Truck Cartel Appeals and the Spanish Supreme Court’s Self-Inflicted Docket Crisis
Voluntary in form, coercive in tone
The recent non-jurisdictional agreement of the Spanish Supreme Court on pending truck cartel appeals should not be mistaken for a genuine turn to mediation. Formally, the Court merely proposes referral to mediation. In substance, however, it is doing something rather different: it is trying to convert the predictability generated by its own case law into settlement pressure. The message to the parties is clear enough. After years of rulings on these appeals, they already know -more or less- how most of them will end; insisting on a judgment rather than a consensual solution may therefore have consequences in legal costs. Voluntary in form, coercive in tone, the agreement is less an endorsement of mediation as a suitable form of dispute resolution than a managerial response to a mass of repetitive appeals the Court no longer wishes to decide one by one. It is an extraordinary institutional response trying to manage an impossible docket.
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