Abstract
AbstractThe Brazilian Supreme Court has developed an informal mechanism of timing control: each justice has the power (pedido de vista) to request more time to study the files of a given case. In this article, we use a database of over 1.5 million cases to calculate vista request duration and compare vista behavior to other activities in which caseload and the justice’s efficiency play a role. Our results show that vistas can function as an individual power, unconstrained by the Court’s internal rules of procedure, to indefinitely remove cases from the agenda, in ways that cannot be explained by the Court’s workload. We also find initial evidence of the vistas being used for strategic purposes, when justices wait for a case to be decided in a more favorable composition or political context. These results suggest that comparative analyses of courts should look beyond formal rules of docket control to study informal means of delay.
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