Assessing the Judicial Efficiency of District Courts in Pakistan: An Empirical Evidence Using Extended Linear Programming Technique

Abstract

Objective: The present study focuses on measuring efficiency of district courts of Punjab, Pakistan taking into consideration various measures of productivity.

Research Gap: To our knowledge, quantitatively analysis of these issues is not done so far dealing the efficiency issue of the Justice System both at higher and lower level of Judiciary in Pakistan. Therefore, this study embraces this novelty in itself by measuring the efficiency of lower courts in Punjab’ judiciary system considering the judges’ caseloads, administrative staff, and court expenses.

Design/Methodology/Approach: The study adopted frontier approach i.e., Data Envelopment Analysis for the calculation of efficiency estimates for 36 Districts of Punjab using the dataset of the year 2020-21.

The Main Findings: Registration (Filing) of new cases in civil courts is found to be the most restrictive exogenous factors causing delays in the case disposition.

Theoretical / Practical Implications of the Findings: The most important implication of this study is to highlight the existing bottlenecks in the courts at district level. By calculating pure, overall and scale efficiency of courts, the judicial bodies can have better understanding whether it’s the issue of human and physical resources or the size of courts itself causing high rate of pendency of cases in district courts of Punjab.

Originality/Value: This study is innovative in its issue and approach to discuss the quality of judicial services. So far there is no empirical estimation of efficiency of courts of Pakistan at District level. Hence this shows a significant contribution of this study in existing literature.