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Empirical analysis of civil litigation determinants: The Case of Spain

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Abstract

This paper analyses the determinants of civil litigation in Spain drawing on the Law and Economics approach. Using a panel data for 50 Spanish provinces, this study makes a first exploratory approach to empirically investigate the effect of the 2000 Civil Procedural Law Reform on the demand for civil justice over the period 1995–2010, controlling for other determinants of litigation such as the economic growth, the expansion of the Bar, the number of judges, and other socio-demographic characteristics. According to the results, the growing number of civil cases filed in Spain in recent years seems to be a consequence of the combination of the law reform, relevant socio-economic factors, and most importantly the economic recession.

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Notes

  1. For more details see Sect. 3.

  2. For a briefly review of the literature, see Sect. 2.

  3. See Sect. 4.

  4. See, among others, Shavell (1982, 2004), Bebchuk (1984), Priest and Klein (1984), Cooter and Rubinfeld (1989, 1990), Rubinfeld and Scotchmer (1993).

  5. See, for example, Shavell (1982, 2004), Bebchuk (1984), Priest and Klein (1984), Cooter and Rubinfeld (1989, 1990), Rubinfeld and Scotchmer (1993).

  6. See Posner (1992), Cooter and Ullen (1997), Shavell (2004). For a comprehensive analysis of the empirical literature on litigation in civil courts see Kessler and Rubinfeld (2007). A description on the determinants of civil litigation in Spain is presented in Cabrillo and Pastor (2001), and Pastor (2007).

  7. See Paik et al. (2013a, b).

  8. Yoon (2001) and Avraham (2007) present similar results.

  9. For a recent survey of the literature, see Maclean (2010).

  10. Following Coelho and Garoupa (2006), "In no-fault fault grounds for divorce, divorce proceedings can be initiated without any proof of wrongdoing, neither spouse is considered responsible for the breakup of the marriage, and neither spouse has to prove that the other spouse did something wrong. A fault divorce is one in which one party blames the other for the failure of the marriage by citing wrongdoing. Fault divorce is more common when abuse is a factor. Abandonment, desertion, inability to engage in sexual intercourse, insanity, and imprisonment are other causes for fault divorce".

  11. No-fault rules decrease the costs of getting divorce, so one can intuitively expect an increase in divorce rates. See, among others, Allen (1998), Brining and Buckley (1998), Friedberg (1998), Binner and Dnes (2001), Gruber (2004), Rasul (2006), Coelho and Garupa (2006), González-Val and Marcén (2012), Jiménez-Rubio et al. (2016).

  12. See Ellman and Lohr (1998) and Wolfers (2006).

  13. Where Civil Litigation Rate = (civil cases filed ÷ population) * 1000, excluding family cases.

  14. Filed Civil Cases shows the same pattern. See Fig. 2a of Appendix 1.

  15. See Priest and Klein (1984) and Hanssen (1999).

  16. See Sect. 3.1.

  17. For a comprehensive descriptive analysis of litigation in all jurisdictions in Spain see Pastor (2007).

  18. “[u]n conjunto de instrumentos encaminados a lograr un acortamiento del tiempo necesario para una definitiva determinación de lo jurídico en los casos concretos, es decir, sentencias menos alejadas del comienzo del proceso, medidas cautelares más asequibles y eficaces, ejecución forzosa menos gravosa para quien necesita promoverla, y con más posibilidades de éxito en la satisfacción real de los derechos e intereses legítimos” (Exposición de motivos. Ley 1/2000 de Enjuiciamiento Civil, apartado I.2).

  19. See Jiménez and Pastor (2004, 2007), and Pastor and Robledo (2006). A legal approach on this subject can be seen, among others, in Lledó Yagüe (2000), Lorca Navarrete (2000) and De Andrés (2006).

  20. Information about procedures duration is scarce. In Judicial Statistic there is no data disaggregated by courts. The General Council of the Judiciary publishes information about the average length in different jurisdictions in its annual report (The Spanish Judiciary in Figures). The average length of procedures in Civil First-Instance Courts in 1999 was 9.36 months, being 7.7 months in 2010.

  21. When the amount of debt is greater than 6000 euros the process continues through an Ordinary Proceeding.

  22. See Martin-Pastor (2012).

  23. Following Mora-Sanguinetti (2010), “Formalism level brings closer the number and complexity of required formalities to reach the ending of a process”. The rates were calculated by the author following Djankov et al. (2003) methodology, although adapted to Spanish legal framework.

  24. See Djankov et al. (2003) and Mora-Sanguinetti (2010). In Spain, there is no precise information about procedures duration by province. The General Council of the Judiciary publishes every year an approximation to procedures duration based on the information about cases admitted, resolved and in process. Consequently, in this article we don’t analyze the law effects on procedures duration.

  25. For more details on the Judicial Organization in Spain see Garoupa et al. (2012).

  26. Spanish Bar Association (http://www.cgae.es/portalCGAE/home.do).

  27. See Fig. 2c of Appendix 1.

  28. See Posner (1997).

  29. For more details on the legal service markets see Hadfield (2000).

  30. Ginsburg and Hoetker (2006), Buonanno and Galizzi (2014) find that the number of lawyers does exert a positive and statistically significant effect on the litigation rate. Posner (1997) and Clemenz and Gugler (2000) find a positive but no statistically significant effect, while Hanssen (1999) finds a negative and statistically significant effect on the demand for justice.

  31. Spanish Bar Association (http://www.cgae.es/portalCGAE/home.do). For more details about the characteristics of the Spanish market of lawyers see Mora-Sanguinetti and Garoupa (2015).

  32. See Fig. 2d of Appendix 1.

  33. See Fig. 2e of Appendix 1.

  34. See Fig. 2f of Appendix 1.

  35. Posner (1997) and Buonanno and Galizzi (2014).

  36. See Hanssen (1999) who found that population density has a positive and significant correlation with the Annual Civil Filings per 1000 population in Trial Courts. Given that over the period studied the size of provinces have not changed much in Spain, population density actually measures the impact of changes in population. Therefore, we have reported our results using population. Using population density instead does not substantially alter the results.

  37. Family cases have been excluded from the analysis given that to the law passed in 2005 intended to speed up divorce processes (“Express Divorce Law”).

  38. The New Civil Procedural Law was enacted in 2000, but it came effective in 2001.

  39. For log transformed variables the coefficients can be directly interpreted as elasticities. However, for unemployment and education the coefficients can be interpreted as the impact (in percentage terms) of a 1 per cent point increase on education and unemployment.

  40. Under the null hypothesis that regressors are uncorrelated with the error term, the random effects provide more efficient estimates than the fixed effect model.

  41. This is consistent with the findings of Daniels (1982).

Abbreviations

NCPA:

New Civil Procedure Act

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Acknowledgments

Authors would like to thank D. Ildefonso Villán Criado for his valuable help with the Judicial Statistics of the Spanish Council of the Judiciary. We gratefully acknowledge the advice of David Epstein, Sabela Oubiña, and valuable comments made by EJLE referees, Giovanni Ramello, Alessandro Melcarne and participants in the Economic Analysis of Litigation Workshop (Torino, 2015). Authors thank the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (Research Grants ECO2011-29445 and ECO2010-17049).

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  1. Departamento de Economía Aplicada, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Universidad de Granada, Campus Cartuja s/n, 18071, Granada, Spain

    Virginia Rosales & Dolores Jiménez-Rubio

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  1. Virginia Rosales
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  2. Dolores Jiménez-Rubio
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Correspondence to Virginia Rosales.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Fig. 2.

Appendix 2

See Table 2, 3.

Table 2 Descriptive statistics
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Table 3 Correlation matrix
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Rosales, V., Jiménez-Rubio, D. Empirical analysis of civil litigation determinants: The Case of Spain. Eur J Law Econ 44, 321–338 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10657-016-9543-2

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