High temperatures have been shown to affect human cognition and decision-making in a variety of settings. In this paper, we explore the extent to which higher temperatures affect judicial decision-making in India. We use data on judicial decisions from the Indian eCourt platform, merged with high-resolution gridded daily weather data. We estimate causal effects by leveraging a fixed effects framework. We find that high daily maximum temperatures raise the likelihood of convictions and these results are robust to numerous controls and specifications. Our findings contribute to a growing literature that documents that the negative impacts of rising temperatures are often more severe in low- and middle-income countries.

Every year, there are over 200 traumatic deaths at work in Australia. A government safety inspector usually investigates each incident. The investigation may lead to prosecution of the employer or another party deemed to have breached relevant legislation. However, little systematic research has examined the needs and interests of grieving families in this process. Drawing on interviews with 48 representatives of institutions that deal with deaths at work (including regulators, unions, employers, police and coronial officers), this article examines how they view the problems and experiences of families. Notwithstanding some recent improvements, findings indicate ongoing shortcomings in meeting the needs of families regarding information provision, involvement and securing justice.

We draw on uniquely detailed micro-level data from a Belgian professional medical liability insurer to examine how different procedural and legal events that take place during the unfolding of a medical malpractice claim influence the timing of its settlement. Utilizing the competing risks regression framework, we find that settlement hazard is all else equal statistically significantly positively associated with the completion of those procedural and legal events that most effectively reveal factual information about the underlying medical malpractice case. Consistent with theory, settlement hazard is either unassociated or even negatively associated with the completion of other procedural and legal events. Our analysis, therefore, provides policy insights into which aspects of the resolution process could be emphasized, and which de-emphasized, in order to reduce the often excessive duration of medical malpractice claims and its adverse effects on the healthcare system.

In this paper, the unilateral divorce law is modelled through the combination of exclusive rights on the marriage dissolution and alternative compensation rules benefiting to the parent having custody of the children. Their influence are studied both in the short run (probability and efficiency of divorce) and in the long run (selection of marriages). We show that a decrease in the costs of divorce proceedings has by no means commonplace consequences on marriage contracting; particularly when consideration of parents' altruism and child support is introduced, more marriages are contracted when the cost of divorces decreases.