More Hands, More Time? Unpacking the Clerk Effect in the Czech Constitutional Court

In 2003, the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic faced a crisis: a nearly paralyzed bench due to political deadlock and a fivefold increase in caseload over the prior decade. To mitigate this judicial bottleneck, the Court implemented a major policy shift, increasing the number of full-time judicial assistants per judge from one to three. Despite the significance of this reform, its impact on judicial efficiency remains unevaluated. This paper exploits this institutional break to estimate the elasticity of case disposal time with respect to clerk staffing. We construct a unique panel dataset combining Paulik’s (2024) case-level data with internal administrative records on Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) staffing. Using a judge-fixed effects model to control for time-invariant judicial heterogeneity, we test whether the increased labour inputs reduce processing time. Preliminary results reveal a counter-intuitive finding: an increase in FTE clerks is significantly associated with longer disposition times. We find that an increase in clerk support correlates with a significant rise in the days required to close a case. Rather than indicating bureaucratic inefficiency, we present evidence suggesting an endogenous allocation of resources: judges systematically assign higher staffing levels to legally complex cases. These findings challenge the assumption that expanding support staff automatically accelerates justice.