Time After Time: The Effects of Small Group Forces and Institutional Features on the Pace of Adjudication

In this paper we examine the impact of small group forces on case processing time on a high court. Extending previous research that treats case processing time as an indicator of the extent of bargaining and compromise among justices, we adopt a comparative perspective and analyze the disparities in the amount of time reserved to argue a case and the amount of time a merits panel takes to decide it. We expect that these disparities are influenced by a host of small group forces, including leadership styles, reference group identities, and professional backgrounds present in the group, levels of experience with the deliberative process, and heterogeneity in the justices’ opinions. To test our expectations, we estimate an ordinary least squares model on all cases decided on the merits by five-justice panels on the Norwegian Supreme Court from 2008 to 2023. Our findings largely lend support to our hypotheses. Moreover, we find that the relative speed of case processing on the Norwegian Supreme Court is influenced by a number of case attributes and institutional factors, of which the Court’s workload exerts the largest effect in magnitude.