While civil law courts of last resort—e.g., cassation courts in France, Italy, and Chile—review up to 90% of appealed cases, common law courts of last resort—e.g., supreme courts of the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada—hear as few as 1% of the same petitions. In this study, we postulate that these different policies can be explained by a comparatively larger commitment from common law courts of last resort to judicial law-making rather than judicial uniformity. While courts require few hearings to update the law (in theory one decision is sufficient), they need a large number of hearings to maximize consistency in the lower courts’ interpretation of the law. We show that the optimal number of hearings increases with an increment in the courts’ concern for uniformity. We also show that if hearing costs are linear then the hearing policies of all courts can be classified in only two types. In addition, we predict important changes in hearing policies when the number of petitions increases. Finally, we find that hearing rates and reversal disutility operate as two ways in which a legal system can achieve a given level of judicial uniformity.

中文翻译：

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解释万不得已法院审理的案件数量差异

虽然最后诉诸的大陆法法院（例如法国，意大利和智利的最高法院）对高达90％的上诉案件进行审查，但最后诉诸普通法的法院（例如美国，英国和加拿大的最高法院） -听到的请愿书只有1％。在这项研究中，我们假定可以通过普通法法院相对较大的承诺来解释这些不同的政策，而普通法院最终选择诉诸司法立法而不是司法统一。尽管法院几乎不需要听证会来更新法律（理论上一个裁决就足够了），但他们需要进行大量听证会以最大限度地提高下级法院对法律的解释的一致性。我们表明，最佳听证次数随着法院对统一性的关注程度的提高而增加。我们还表明，如果听证成本是线性的，那么所有法院的听证政策只能分为两种。此外，我们预计随着请愿数量的增加，听力政策将发生重要变化。最后，我们发现，听证率和逆转功用是法律体系可以实现给定水平的司法统一性的两种方式。