The Impacts of Peer Relationship between High Courts and District Courts on Reversal Rates: an Example of the Judge Transfer System with a Fixed-Term Period of Service in Taiwan

The project uses a special system of judge transfer in Taiwan that has a fixed-term period of service between district courts and high courts – after the judge's first promotion to a high court for three years, the judge must return to a district court if he or she does not renew the position in the high court – to explore whether the reversal rate of the district court judges who experienced such a system is affected by such peer relationships established in the high court. Focusing on 269 judges with this experience between 2002 and 2013, we use two mechanisms to study the issue systematically: (1) We aim at the judges who returned to the district courts under the supervision of the same high court which they had ever stayed upon the expiration, because the random case assignment system in high courts makes the strength of peer relationship differentiates randomly across different cases. (2) We compare the reversal rates between two types of judges: those who returned to the district courts under the supervision of the high court which they had ever stayed and those not under the same high court. Because only the former has the direct influence of high-court peer relationship, we can further assess this effect. Our peer relation information is first-hand data and will be extracted from the Judicial Yuan's Judgment Database using text mining techniques. The number of judges and samples and the types of cases will not only be far more than the existing literature but also be able to be analyzed in more sublet and appropriate approaches.The project will examine whether the peer relationship at the inter-trial/panel level affects the reversal rate of appeals and whether this effect will also fade over time. In addition, whether this effect will differentiate with different types of cases is also the focus of this project. The project not only extends the types of cases discussed in the literature but also provides an examination of Taiwan's judicial impartiality as well as prompt and rich policy suggestions on judicial reform, given the empirical results.