TY  - JOUR
AU  - Djankov,Simeon
AU  - Porta,Rafael La
AU  - Lopez-de-Silane,Florencio
AU  - Shleifer,Andrei
TI  - Courts: the Lex Mundi Project
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 8890
PY  - 2002
Y2  - April 2002
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8890
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w8890.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Simeon Djankov
min
E-Mail: sdjankov@minfin.bg

Rafael La Porta
Dartmouth College
Tuck School
210 Tuck Hall
Hanover, NH  03755
Tel: 603/646-3739
E-Mail: rafael.laporta@dartmouth.edu

Florencio Lopez-de-Silanes
EDHEC Business School
393, Promenade des Anglais BP 3116
06202 Nice Cedex 3
FRANCE
Tel: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 07
Fax: +33 (0) 4 93 18 78 41
E-Mail: Florencio.lopezdesilanes@edhec.edu

Andrei Shleifer
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-9
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5046
Fax: 617/496-1708
E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu
AB  - In cooperation with Lex Mundi member law firms in 109 countries, we measure and describe the exact procedures used by litigants and courts to evict a tenant for non-payment of rent and to collect a bounced check. We use these data to construct an index of procedural formalism of dispute resolution for each country. We find that such formalism is systematically greater in civil than in common law countries.  Moreover, procedural formalism is associated with higher expected duration of judicial proceedings, more corruption, less consistency, less honesty, less fairness in judicial decisions, and inferior access to justice.  These results suggest that legal transplantation may have led to an inefficiently high level of procedural formalism, particularly in developing countries.
ER  -