Detection of Irregular Assignments of Cases to Judges

This thesis develops tools to detect irregular assignments of cases to judges and applies them to Ecuador's judicial system.It derives the sharp bounds on the overall, court-specific, and judge-specific probabilities that a case's assignment is inconsistent with existing regulations. The bounds rely on administrative case assignment data and one, or both, of the following assumptions: (i) that certain observed case characteristics do not influence which judge a case should be assigned to, and (ii) that the probability distribution over the judges that each case should be assigned to is known (e.g. uniform, random assignment). I construct a database of all publicly-available case assignments in Ecuador's district courts, with over two million assignments from 2016 to 2020 and I find 6.6% of judges to be involved in irregular assignments and 2.6% of assignments, or 58 thousand assignments, to be irregular overall.