With or without the parties' presence within the court-administrative procedure? Lessons from Poland.

Abstract

Courts` disputes in contemporary jurisdictions are heard either with parties` participation – physical or remote - or in-camera, without any forms of orality. The article is aimed at examining the consequences of the case forum for a judgment before the Polish First Instance Administrative Courts (FIACs). We will explore if there are any connections between the parties` presence or absence during proceedings for the probability of the complainant’s winning, the time required to adjudicate the case in the first instance, and the probability of appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC). A basis for the research is a full-text database of the universe of first and second-instance judgments of Polish Administrative Courts (CBOSA) with all judgments issued by FIACs over 2016–2022, embracing a sample of nearly 250 thousand judgments. The research design is based on the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, which caused a shift from physical hearings to in-camera adjudication. The pandemic changed the preferences of parties towards in-camera deliberation and provoked legislative changes promoting in-camera adjudication. The results indicate that compared to hearings, in-camera adjudication shortened the time to adjudicate the case. This shift was beneficial for shortening the time to adjudicate the case. Although we found a statistically significant effect of in-camera adjudication on the probability of compliant winning in the first instance (negative) and appealing to SAC (negative) the size of the effects remains small.