Measuring efficiency of Brazilian courts with data envelopment analysis (DEA)

In Brazilian law, there may be nothing as uncontroversial as the idea that courts are slow, inefficient and unable to attend to citizens’ demand. Court inefficiency has been well acknowledged for many decades. Yet, the crucial question ‘How bad are they? ‘ has never been answered. For many different reasons, almost all legal research carried out in Brazil has been subjective, relying entirely on conventional wisdom and anecdoctal evidence. The purpose of this paper is to try to address the lack of empirical research on the performance of the Brazilian judiciary. We employ data envelopment analysis to measure the efficiency of Brazilian state courts. Results show that relative efficiency varies substantially across the 27 state courts in the country. Moreover, we will also argue that the lack of human and material resources cannot be blamed as the main reason for inefficiency, as it is traditionally believed. Finally, there seems to be some evidence that court efficiency is correlated with the performance of court management. In other words, efficient courts are those that exhibit better management.