Abstract
Do different panels at the German Federal Court apply different legal standards? Several recent studies document disparities between decision-makers in asylum adjudication and sentencing, mostly within the U.S. courts. However, we still know little about inconsistency in adjudication in countries with a civil law tradition, where judges are generally thought to play a more modest role than in common law countries. In this paper, I develop a novel two-step estimator of inconsistency in judicial decision-making. I apply the estimator to an original dataset of more than 22,000 appeals in criminal cases from 1990 to 2016 at the German Federal Court. The results suggest that around 18.5% of appeals (or 4090 cases) would have been decided differently if randomly reassigned to a different panel. Panels disagree the most on whether to reject or partially grant an appeal, assault cases, and appeals filed by the prosecution. The findings have direct implications for policy-makers concerned with the quality of adjudication as well as for the study of judicial behavior in civil law countries.