An integrative approach to reviewing the literature on judicial efficiency in Europe

The law exists to regulate the behaviour of the members of its community. Economics exists to study the behaviour of individual or group economic agents in allocating resources for production, distribution, and consumption. Together, law and economics concern the application of economics to the practice of law, seeing the law as an economic efficiency-promoting tool for social purposes. Indeed, economic development and litigation have evolved hand in hand, which led to a growing difference between supply and demand with a direct impact on judicial efficiency. However, evaluating the functioning of judicial machinery has been addressed superficially in the literature. Furthermore, grasping the big picture of judicial efficiency in a structured way has never been attempted. Therefore, this integrative literature review investigates judicial efficiency within the European context by synthesising law and economics research. From over 6,500 articles, 50 were critically analysed, offering new perspectives for future research and policy implications on enhancing European judicial systems. This analysis concerned bibliographic data (e.g., 80% of the studies have been published over the last decade), application context (e.g., Italian courts are the most studied entities), model structure (e.g., Data Envelopment Analysis-based methods are the most used ones to measure judicial efficiency), and key findings (e.g., courts across Europe are very heterogeneous). In the end, we provide several renewed perspectives on judicial efficiency that can pave the way for the future of this topic.