Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/26410 
Authors: 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
CESifo Working Paper No. 2365
Publisher: 
Center for Economic Studies and ifo Institute (CESifo), Munich
Abstract: 
Legal philosophers like Montesquieu, Hegel and Tocqueville have argued that lay participation in judicial decision-making would have benefits reaching far beyond the realm of the legal system narrowly understood. From an economic point of view, lay participation in judicial decision-making can be interpreted as a renunciation of an additional division of labor, which is expected to cause foregone benefits in terms of the costs as well as the quality of judicial decision-making. In order to be justified, these foregone benefits need to be overcompensated by other actually realized benefits of at least the same magnitude. This paper discusses pros and cons of lay participation, presents a new database and tests some of the theoretically derived hypotheses empirically. The effects of lay participation on the judicial system, a number of governance variables but also on economic performance indicators are rather modest. A proxy representing historic experiences with any kind of lay participation is the single most robust variable.
Subjects: 
Economic effects of legal systems
judicial decision-making
trial by jury
jurors
lay assessors
constitutional economics
civil society
quality of governance
history of thought
JEL: 
B15
H11
H41
H73
K41
P51
Document Type: 
Working Paper
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