Valors ètics per a l’excel·lència professional dels jutges

En aquest treball ens hem proposat els següents objectius: Explicitar els valors ètics que permeten l’excel·lència professional dels jutges; Conèixer l’estat de la qüestió, esbrinar la consciència que els futurs professionals tenen dels valors requerits per dur a terme una funció de qualitat i d’aquells que ja l’han exercit durant 8 anys; Proposar mesures organitzatives per promoure i dinamitzar l’excel·lència professional dels jutges. El treball consta de dues parts. En una primera expliquem què és ètica professional i explicitem aquells valors que necessàriament ha d’encarnar un jutge en el seu exercici professional perquè aquest sigui, més enllà de no negligent i acomplir la deontologia, una aposta per l’excel·lència. Al llarg d’aquesta part albirem polítiques organitzatives, recomanacions, suggeriments (codis ètics, comitè d’ètica professional, etc.) per dinamitzar, des de l’autoregulació, la vigència dels valors ètics de les professions jurídiques que afavoreixen l’excel·lència professional. En una segona part, es presenten les conclusions de l’estudi de camp a partir d’una enquesta sobre aquells valors realitzada, el 10 de febrer del 2004, als jutges que estan a l’Escola Judicial de Barcelona rebent la formació inicial. Amb aquesta segona part exposem el grau de consciència i compromís en la responsabilitat inherents a la professió de jutge.

The short arm of the law: judicial institutions and local governance in Brazil

This paper estimates the effect of judicial institutions on governance at the local level in Brazil. Our estimation strategy exploits a unique institutional feature of state judiciary branches which assigns prosecutors and judges to the most populous among contiguous counties forming a judiciary district. As a result of this assignment mechanism there are counties with nearly identical populations, some with and some without local judicial presence, which we exploit to impute counterfactual outcomes. Conditional on observable county characteristics, offenses per civil servant are about 35% lower in counties that have a local seat of the state judiciary. The lower incidence of infractions stems mostly from fewer violations of financial management regulations by local administrators, fewer instances of problems in project execution and project managment, fewer cases of non-existent or ineffective civil society oversight and fewer cases of improper handling of remittances to local residents.

Property as an economic concept: Reconciling legal and economic conceptions of property rights in a Coasean framework

Adopting a simplistic view of Coase (1960), most economic analyses of property rightsdisregard both the key advantage that legal property rights (that is, in rem rights) provide torightholders in terms of enhanced enforcement, and the difficulties they pose to acquirers interms of information asymmetry about legal title. Consequently, these analyses tend to overstatethe role of "private ordering" and disregard the two key elements of property law: first, theessential conflict between property (that is, in rem) enforcement and transaction costs; and,second, the institutional solutions created to overcome it, mainly contractual registries capable ofmaking truly impersonal (that is, asset-based) trade viable when previous relevant transactionson the same assets are not verifiable by judges. This paper fills this gap by reinterpreting bothelements within the Coasean framework and thus redrawing the institutional foundations of bothproperty and corporate contracting.

Judges' cognition and market order

We argue that during the crystallization of common and civil law in the 19th century, the optimal degree of discretion in judicial rulemaking, albeit influenced by the comparative advantages of both legislative and judicial rulemaking, was mainly determined by the anti-market biases of the judiciary. The different degrees of judicial discretion adopted in both legal traditions were thus optimally adapted to different circumstances, mainly rooted in the unique, market-friendly, evolutionary transition enjoyed by English common law as opposed to the revolutionary environment of the civil law. On the Continent, constraining judicial discretion was essential for enforcing freedom of contract and establishing a market economy. The ongoing debasement of pro-market fundamentals in both branches of the Western legal system is explained from this perspective as a consequence of increased perceptions of exogenous risks and changes in the political system, which favored the adoption of sharing solutions and removed the cognitive advantage of parliaments and political leaders.