The myth of "backlog clearance": a quantitative empirical study on the productivity gap, the geography of efficiency, and cognitive bottlenecks in the Pernambuco State Court system.

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between judicial demand and decision-making behavior in Brazilian state courts, utilizing census data from judicial units of the Court of Justice of Pernambuco (TJPE). The study contrasts traditional Law & Economics literature — which predicts a "flight from merit" by overburdened magistrates—with empirical field evidence. The data reveals a strong positive correlation (r=0.58) between workload and merit decisions, refuting the hypothesis of opportunistic avoidance behavior. However, a structural phenomenon identified as a productivity gap emerges: a growing divergence between the systemic capacity to process cases (administrative disposals) and the cognitive capacity to render decisions (judgments). Disaggregated regional analysis exposes a functional dichotomy: the Metropolitan Region operates under a logic of "flow efficiency" (high rate of case disposal, lower conversion into merit decisions), while interior judicial districts (Agreste and Sertão) maintain a predominant focus on substantive adjudication. The contemporary efficiency bottleneck lies not in caseflow management but in cognitive constraints, suggesting that public policies focused solely on quantitative backlog reduction targets ignore the artisanal nature of the act of judging.