Economics of law and quality indicators in the field of justice.

Summary Justice is indeed a good with specific characteristics that make it a "trust good". This quality is not, moreover, revealed to consumers even after consumption of the good. In this respect, one may wonder about the interest of the "certification" of this justice. The market has in fact invented certification as a useful "signal" for "standard goods" and "experience goods", on the quality of which previous consumption provides information, and which can then be standardized. In this case, producers offering high quality goods can hope to have an "informational rent" that allows them to signal this quality in a credible way, for example through a label. Certification, on the other hand, is not well suited to trusted goods. There is dissatisfaction with the evaluation of jurisdictional activity by a single battery of cost-centered performance indicators. The effectiveness or efficiency of justice also depends on the affective support of citizens, and has an emotional dimension that is reflected in the trust that citizens place in it, or not. The acceptability of legal decisions is also a guarantee of their proper execution, and, more broadly, of the effectiveness of the dissuasive dimension of the sanction recognized by the law. This acceptance can also be of a nature to compensate for the invisible social costs of renouncing justice (perpetuation of unresolved situations, frustration of not being able to obtain a satisfactory jurisdictional solution, etc.). It is in this context that we will shed light in the first part on an economic approach to justice, which opens up perspectives for reflection on the theory of prices applied to the resolution of disputes, on the optimal conditions for resolving conflicts, and on the economic effects of the behaviour of litigants. The economic analysis of law (EAL) then becomes our tool, the central pivot of analysis. The economic analysis of law is the discipline that seeks to explain legal phenomena using the methods and concepts of economics. This double discipline deals with the analysis of legal phenomena by the tools of economics. By tools of economics, one must understand mainly the cost-benefit analysis, the concepts of average costs, the reflection on the implementation of indicators used to measure an activity. Then it becomes necessary to go beyond this concept, to broaden our vision, which leads us to question the way(s) to improve the judicial systems of treatment of disputes based on the quality approach. Thus, the theme of quality in justice in general and in judicial decisions in particular, opens the field to a normative analysis centered on the notion of cost/time and social efficiency, which analyses will open the doors to pragmatic reflection on the use and relevance of confidence and legitimization inducing devices. These new confidence and legitimation inducing devices are called "Governance" when they apply to legal production in the sense of "giving an order". They are called "Mediation" when applied to the prevention or resolution of conflicts in the sense of "finding a solution that prevents the occurrence of a conflict or that settles it". All this, in order to facilitate the emergence of a cooperative solution. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR), conceived in civil law as a manifestation of the contractual freedom of the subjects of rights, a freedom that allows them to compromise on the existence, the extent or the exercise of their subjective rights in order to put an end to a dispute, thus appears as a means of avoiding a trial. This is the first of its functions, generally put forward by the economic analysis of law when it considers the judgment as a failure of negotiation between the parties. At the same time, ADR is generally seen as a diversionary technique. The transaction appears to be a means of preventing and settling a dispute before resorting to legal proceedings, which can only benefit from this relief because they will be fewer and therefore faster. ADR can also be used at many different moments: it can allow for the resolution of a dispute before it has crystallized to the point of going to court, just as it can put an end to a dispute when the judge has only just been seized. Some authors evoke the idea of a "mediation in the shadow of the law". The last part of this thesis instructs us to focus our reflection on a field approach, that of the evaluation and control of quality in France, that of the implementation of the quality approach in the jurisdictions, with possible biases such as "the effects of legal aid on the incentive to take legal action, on the mode of resolution of conflicts..." that finally of the measurement of the activity through relevant indicators. The analysis of the activity of the TGI in terms of indicators in general, and that of the TGI of Nancy in particular, highlights the difficulty of the homogeneity of the notion of cases and its reductive nature, it being understood, however, that "cases" correspond to civil lawsuits, and not to measures of orders or instructions. This analysis makes it possible to highlight an important reflection on the method(s) to be used in order to improve and control the results, essentially in terms of time and costs.