Time efficiency as a measure of court performance: evidence from the Court of Justice of the European Union

This work proposes an alternative measure of court performance, namely, time efficiency, which is equal to the length of a verdict divided by the time needed to resolve the case. Using the data of resolved judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) from 1954 to 2017, we show that, first, backlog causes time efficiency to fall using a vector autoregression model (VAR), and, second, the lowest value of time efficiency coincides with the establishment of the General Court in 1989. We argue with evidence that the improvement of time efficiency since 1989 was a result of the reform of the CJEU.