The Inquisitorial and the Adversarial Procedure in a Criminal Court Setting

We provide a comparison of the adversarial and inquisitorial trial procedures. We find that social costs associated with a given level of justice are always smaller under the adversarial rule. Nevertheless, the inquisitorial rule may be better because it allows for state control of all the investigative expenditures. In contrast, under the adversarial procedure, investigative expenditures will be mainly constrained by individual wealth, leading to inefficient justice levels, higher social cost, and potentially large inequalities.