DA - Court Clog - CNDI 2024

Courts clog DA
1nc shell
1NC – econ
<insert link>
An inefficient court system tanks the economy
Kapopoulus 23 Panayotis Kapopoulos, attends University of Piraeus, Piraeus, and is a member of the Greece Economic Research Division, Alpha Bank, Athens, Greece, “Judicial efficiency and economic growth: Evidence based on European Union,“ Scottish Journal of Political Economy, data Volume 71 issue 1 19 July 2023, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sjpe.12357#:~:text=A%20large%20strand%20of%20the,in%20turn%2C%20support%20economic%20growth//
2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Linkages between judicial efficiency and economic activity A large strand of the literature provides empirical evidence of a strong positive relationship between judicial efficiency and various aspects of economic performance, such as firm size, foreign direct investments, investment and credit supply, which, in turn, support economic growth. The first pillar of the literature examines the relationship between the efficiency and quality of judicial systems with the firms' size and productivity. In general, an increase in the average size of firms implies productivity gains for the economy, fostering growth dynamics through the enhancement of scale economies. According to Lorizio and Gurrieri (2014), an inefficient judicial system may have adverse effects on several areas of businesses' performance, hampering employment decisions (through failures in the enforcement of the employment legislation) and investment plans (through failures in the contract enforcement) affecting negatively firms' size. Kumar et al. (2001) corroborate a positive relationship between the judicial efficiency and the average firm size, especially for the lower capital-intensive firms. Beck et al. (2006) provide evidence of a positive relationship between the protection of property rights and the firms' size. Chakraborty (2016), using data for Indian manufacturing, provides evidence that judicial quality is positively related to businesses' performance. Chemin (2020) suggests that judicial reforms financed by foreign aid agencies have positive effects on firms' perceptions about judicial efficiency, leading to significant gains in firms' productivity. Several country-specific studies confirm the positive implications of a well-functional justice system to the firm size. Laeven and Woodruff (2007) find that the Mexican states with more efficient legal systems exhibit larger firms, mainly through a lower idiosyncratic risk faced by entrepreneurs, facilitating the smooth completion of their investment plans. García-Posada and Mora-Sanguinetti (2013) confirm this positive relationship between firm size and judicial efficiency in Spain. Giacomelli and Menon (2013) show that a reduction in trial length leads to an increase in the average Italian firm size. Ippoliti et al. (2015) find that judicial efficiency lowers market uncertainty and supports entrepreneurship. A second pillar of the related literature focuses on the effect of judicial efficiency on foreign direct investment (FDI). Foreign equity financing via FDI inflows is considered one of the major sources of capital inflows, fostering growth perspectives through the acceleration of technological progress and the adoption of innovative production techniques. Benassy-Quere et al. (2007) examine the role of institutions in the host and the source country of FDI flows for OECD countries, providing evidence that more efficient protection of civil and property rights, among others, tend to increase FDI inflows. Lorenzani and Lucidi (2014) suggest that improvements in judicial efficiency may profoundly affect business activity and FDI. Comi et al. (2019) and Tag (2021) provide evidence of a positive relationship between judicial efficiency and attractiveness to FDI in Italian municipalities and in developing economies, respectively. The third pillar of the related empirical literature is oriented toward the effects of inefficient justice systems on credit provision. Borrowing restrictions and increases in the cost of lending due to inefficiencies of justice undermine growth perspectives. As Djankov et al. (2008) point out, debt financing is a crucial determinant of economic performance, allowing businesses to finance their investment plans and households to underpin their consumption expenditure. La Porta et al. (1997) find that the legal environment has positive effects on capital markets across countries. Levine (1998) provides evidence that countries with legal codes that protect creditors' rights, highly dependent on the legal origin, are characterized by more developed banking systems. Chemin (2009) examines the effect of the speed of decision-making in judicial system upon several aspects of economic activity in India, such as loans' market and agricultural and manufacturing production. Laeven and Majnoni (2003) suggest that efficiency-enhancing judicial reforms achieve better enforcement of contracts, decrease interest rate spreads across countries, and the cost of borrowing, facilitating the attraction of new investment. Djankov et al. (2008) show that more efficient debt enforcement of contracts is associated with improvements in debt markets, as measured by the ratio of private credit to GDP, as well as that the legal origin plays a crucial role in the efficiency level of debt enforcement. Bae and Goyal (2009) provide evidence that weak contract enforcement is related to compressed loan provision and elevated interest rates. Several studies confirm the negative consequences of inefficient judicial systems on debt financing at a country level (e.g., Jappelli et al., 2005, for Italy and Fabbri, 2010, for Spain). To recapitulate, judicial efficiency plays a crucial role in strengthening economic growth through the attraction of fresh investment, the upholding of the firm growth and productivity gains and the finance of businesses activity through credit. However, there are also several fundamentals that shape the relationship between efficiency and growth. These conditions that determine the magnitude of the effect of judicial efficiency on economic growth are discussed in the following section.
Economic failure causes extinction via polycrisis
Dodwell ’24 (David Dodwell 24, CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, 1/5/24, “No recession in 2023 but it’s not yet time to breathe a sigh of relief,” https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3247313/no-recession-2023-its-not-yet-time-breathe-sigh-relief)
This time last year, the consensus of the world’s leading economists and economic institutions was virtually for a deep recession, continuing into 2024. By March, economist Nouriel Roubini was warning of “the mother of all debt crises”. “We’re moving from the great moderation to the great stagflationary debt crisis and instability,” he said. In April, the International Monetary Fund judged that “risks are firmly on the downside”. What has happened since, that forecasters are now predicting a soft landing and perhaps no recession at all? How did the profession so comprehensively misjudge the prospects for the global economy? First, it remains possible the gloom a year ago was well justified, and a recession still hangs over us. Fears have abated but not gone away. True, the alarming increase in inflation post-pandemic seems to now be under control (at about 3 per cent in the United States, from over 9 per cent in 2022). As a result, anxiety about soaring interest rates, and in particular crippling mortgage costs, has eased. Second, whether a recession looms depends on where you live and how you define it. For many in Asia, where inflation did not become a systemic problem, the recessionary panic has very much been a US or European problem. But for those whipsawed by volatile commodity prices and a crippling surge in debt repayment costs, recession has been a cruel reality for longer than the past year. China’s property crisis has had a recessionary impact but this had little connection with the recession feared by US-based economists. Hong Kong is arguably living through a severe downturn that has little to do with inflation or high interest rates, and more to do with the catastrophic impact of the pandemic on the city’s highly specialised hub and headquarter roles. The definition of a recession is also significant. It is routinely and oversimplistically seen as any combination of negative forces that results in a two-quarter contraction of gross domestic product. For many analysts in the US, this definition involves short-term threats such as rising inflation, job losses, growing debt service costs and mortgages, a credit squeeze and poor property and stock market performances. By these criteria, the recessionary threat has been almost triumphantly well-managed. Inflation is sharply down from 2022 peaks, interest rates are high but stable, job creation has remained boisterous, and the stock market has had a superb year – up by over 26 per cent, according to the Morningstar US Market Index. GDP growth may be slower than liked but stayed firmly positive. High interest and soaring debt service costs may remain a serious threat as debt renewal negotiations fall due, in particular to property companies and indebted homeowners, but for most, these are challenges yet to materialise. But when economists like Roubini warn of recession and stagflationary mega threats, they are talking about a broader combination of long-term challenges immeasurably more dangerous than two quarters of falling GDP. In his book Megathreats, Roubini makes clear he is concerned not just with economic, monetary and financial risks but also with political, geopolitical, environmental, health, technological, trade and globalisation-related ones. Asked which mega threat concerned him the most, Roubini was clear: “In the short run it is stagflation and debt crisis. Over the medium-long term, I worry about war among great powers and how much destruction it can bring, together with climate change.” Roubini is particularly haunted by rising debt worldwide, especially the soaring cost of servicing debt in an era of higher interest rates. He notes that debt worldwide (private, household, corporate, financial sector and public) was less than 100 per cent of GDP in the 1970s, but had risen to 200 per cent by 1999, and in 2022 stood at 350 per cent. In advanced economies, it was 420 per cent of GDP and climbing. According to the Development Finance International’s Debt Service Watch, governments in the Global South are spending 38 per cent of their budget revenue on debt service – equivalent to their combined spending on education, health, social protection and climate. Of these, 35 countries are spending over half of their revenue on debt service. What so haunts people like Roubini is not just the acute pressure on education and health spending, but that this huge and still rising sum is set to strangle spending on pandemic preparedness, climate change and mitigation – even as pressure grows for higher defence spending in light of conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. He is joined by many others anxiously observing what they fear is set to become a global “polycrisis” – a concept recently popularised by historian Adam Tooze as a combination of disparate crises that interact so that the whole is more overwhelming than the sum of the parts, challenging our ability to cope and threatening to “hurtle us towards catastrophic ecological tipping points”. So what is the verdict? For those expecting a technical recession only in the US, the call was deeply and embarrassingly off target. But for those who share Roubini’s angst over mega threats or polycrisis, the alarm justifiably remains. As Harvard University’s Jeffrey Frankel noted back in July, this is like a sky diver who jumps without a working parachute. On his way down, a passing hang glider asks how he is doing and he shouts back: “OK, so far!”
1NC – democracy
<insert link>
An effective judiciary is key to hedge against democratic backsliding – clogged courts deck democracy
Daniel Kelemen and Michael Blauberger 17 334 M. BLAUBERGER AND R. D. KELEMENR. Daniel Kelemen is professor of political science and law, Jean Monnet Chair in Euro-pean Union Politics, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University. “Can courts rescue national democracy?” Judicialsafeguards against democratic backsliding in the EUMichael Blauberger a and R. 2017, JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY, 2017VOL. 24, NO. 3, 321–336http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2016.1229357 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/13501763.2016.1229357?needAccess=true
Faced with rising autocracy at the state level, policy-makers may turn to avariety of tools in an effort to defend liberal democracy. This article assessesthe capacity, and the limitations, of one particular set of tools – judicial tools –that the EU may use to defend democracy at the national level. We assessexisting judicial mechanisms that can be used to defend democracy andthe rule of law in EU member states, as well as proposals for the introduction of new tools designed to strengthen the EU’s capacity in this respect. We find that more can be done to maximize the effectiveness of existing judicial mech-anisms, i.e., infringement proceedings and litigation in national courts. At thes ame time, we warn of general risks associated with relying excessively on the judiciary to defend democracy, and discuss the specific risks posed by thenovel judicial instruments that have been proposed recently as means to strengthen the EU’s ability to combat democratic backsliding. We emphasize,first, that relying too much on courts to defend democracy risks unduly poli-ticizing the EU judiciary, and, second, that this approach may encourage pol-itical leaders to shirk their responsibility to stand up against democratic backsliding. Ultimately, judicial safeguards alone are unlikely to succeed against a determined autocratic member state government. If European leaders want to defend democracy in a member state where it is underthreat, they will have to intervene politically as well. 1The remainder of this article is divided into three sections. The next section explores traditional judicial tools for upholding EU norms and discusses waysto overcome their limitations in confronting challenges to the rule of law anddemocracy. We then review innovative proposals made in recent years to strengthen the EU’s judicial tools for tackling democratic backsliding, high-lighting their potential unintended consequences. The final sectionconcludes.Existing legal safeguards: making the most of a limited toolkitIn ‘normal’ times, enforcement of EU norms draws on two well-established judicial mechanisms: centralized monitoring and enforcement by the Euro-pean Commission, which can refer infringement cases to the EuropeanCourt of Justice (ECJ), and decentralized litigation by private parties beforenational courts, potentially involving preliminary references from nationalcourts to the ECJ. Scholars have noted a number of reasons why these tra-ditional judicial instruments seem ill-suited to tackle member state violationsof fundamental EU values such as democracy and rule of law (Müller 2015:147–9). For instance, the politicized nature of the Commission may limit itsuse of the infringement process, restricted access to justice at the nationallevel (particularly during periods of democratic backsliding) may limit decen-tralized enforcement by private parties, the fact that many of the Treaty pro-visions on fundamental values do not meet the legal criteria for ‘direct effect’322 M. BLAUBERGER AND R. D. KELEMENmeans they cannot be directly invoked by private parties before nationalcourts, and, perhaps most importantly, the incremental, yet cumulatively sys-temic process of democratic backsliding may prove elusive to existingmethods of case-by-case enforcement. Yet, while it is important to recognizethe limitations of these approaches, the literatures on compliance and judicia-lization also remind us that the strategic use of these techniques can some-times prove effective in promoting major policy changes (Stone Sweet2010). Therefore, rather than simply giving up on these traditional judicialtools, we should consider how their effectiveness in defending democraticvalues can be maximized.Infringement proceedingsFrom the dawn of the EU legal order, the infringement procedure – whichempowers the European Commission to bring legal proceedings against amember state government for infringement of EU Treaty requirements or sec-ondary legislation – has been a pillar of the enforcement architecture. Overthe years, the Commission has brought thousands of successful infringementactions, pressing states to come into compliance with EU legal norms evenwhere doing so proved very costly. The infringement procedure was strength-ened in the Maastricht Treaty, when the ECJ was empowered (at the requestof the Commission) to impose penalty payments on member state govern-ments for failure to comply with ECJ rulings in infringement cases. Yet,despite the strengths of this procedure, a number of observers have also high-lighted general weaknesses and its particular limitations as a tool to enforcefundamental rights and other core EU values enshrined in Article 2 of theLisbon Treaty.A general finding of EU compliance research is that the Commission prose-cutes infringements selectively (Hartlapp and Falkner 2009: 292). The Commis-sion enjoys great discretion as to whether to initiate or to settle infringementproceedings, and critics note that the Commission often postpones politicallysensitive conflicts and launches cases only when it seems most likely they willprevail (Conant 2002: 75). This practice of selective enforcement may helpexplain why the Commission has not pursued more infringements againstthe Hungarian government in recent years. And yet, recognizing that strategicconsiderations come into play in the infringement procedure also suggeststhat the Commission might still increase the volume and effectiveness of itsenforcement actions.The past five years have seen the European Commission and other EU insti-tutions preoccupied with managing the eurozone crisis. Strikingly, thenumber of infringement cases referred to the ECJ decreased by over 72 percent since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008. 2 This decline is likelyowing to both the fact that the Commission’s limited resources were beingJOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY 323concentrated on addressing the eurozone crisis and the fact that the Commis-sion was wary of offending member state governments whose co-operationthey needed to address the crisis.While the decrease in infringement proceedings during the eurozone crisisprovides worrying evidence about the Commission’s ability to safeguard therule of law during times of economic crisis, it simultaneously provides groundsto believe that as the eurozone stabilizes, the Commission may return to usingthe infringement procedure more aggressively. Moreover, the line-up of theJuncker Commission that took office in late 2014 has increased the likelihoodof credible enforcement action in the area of EU fundamental values. The firstVice-President, Frans Timmermans, is entrusted with co-ordinating the Com-mission’s activities in the areas of rule of law and fundamental rights. In hisprevious position as Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Timmermans hadbeen one of the signatories of a letter to President Barroso, calling for agreater role of the Commission in safeguarding EU fundamental values atthe member state level. 3 In a possible recent sign of the rejuvenation of theinfringement procedure, the Commission countered member state govern-ments’ attempts to shift the blame to ‘the EU’ for the refugee crisis by initiat-ing 40 strategically timed infringement proceedings against member s

Preview shortened. Download the file for the full document.