LEGAL TRADITION, INSTITUTIONAL CAPACITY, AND JUSTICE-SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

Abstract This article develops a comparative theory of justice-system performance across commonlaw, civil-law, Islamic-law, and hybrid jurisdictions. It extends the supplied manuscript by replacing a predominantly descriptive legal-family taxonomy with a conditional institutional model. The central proposition is that legal tradition is historically persistent and empirically relevant, but its observable effect on performance is mediated and moderated by implementation capacity: judicial resources, professional competence, procedural organization, independence, accountability, legal-aid provision, administrative quality, and technological readiness. Justicesystem performance is therefore modeled as a multidimensional latent vector rather than as a single ranking. The article contributes a production-function model, a latent-variable measurement framework, a dynamic institutional model, interaction hypotheses, threshold effects, and a stochasticfrontier extension. The empirical design uses jurisdiction-year data, fixed and multilevel effects, measurement models, event studies, difference-in-differences, and efficiency-frontier methods. The article distinguishes source-derived evidence from theoretical inference and avoids treating legal-family averages as causal estimates. The research question is consequently not which tradition is universally superior, but under what institutional conditions particular legal architectures generate particular outcomes.