Are Courts to Blame for Delays in Belgian Civil Procedures?: A Decomposition of Case Duration

This article examines the duration of 238 construction cases at three first instance courts in Belgium by composing a detailed timeline for each case. The results show that disputing parties account for 40 percent of overall duration, calendar delays and judges each for 23 percent. Despite the differences in overall duration between our three courts, the relative shares of disputing parties, judges, and legal experts are nearly identical. Furthermore, we combined our quantitative results with interviews of all judges involved in our dataset and an elaborated lawyer survey. Both the quantitativ... Mehr ...