Assessing Trustworthiness of Specialized Courts: A Reconsideration of the ABI-model and Application in a Case Study regarding the Unified Patent Court

In various sectors calls are made for the creation of specialized courts (e.g. environmental law, business law, intellectual property law). In some countries and regions this is indeed leading to the creation of new courts and tribunals. The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is such a new court; it started its operations in Europe in June 2023. The UPC is a specialized international court common to (currently) 17 EU Member States with local and regional divisions, a central division and a court of appeal. It comprises legally qualified judges and technically qualified judges. Many authors have argued that the success of this new patent court will largely depend on "public trust" or more specifically the "trust of the patent user community" in the UPC and its judges (Petersen & Schovsbo 2018; van Zimmeren 2015; Hilty et al 2013). In this respect, in particular the exceptional institutional design of the UPC, but also the profile (i.e. education, experience, skills) of the UPC judges and their performance are considered very important. Trust is, amongst others, determined by the trustee’s trustworthiness: persons will more easily trust another party if they get signals that that party is trustworthy. Mayer et al. (1995) developed the ABI-model, which is widely used by social scientists to measure trustworthiness. According to this model, a trustor finds another party trustworthy if the other party is deemed competent to successfully complete the task entrusted to it (Ability), caring about the trustor’s interests and needs (Benevolence), and is expected to act in a just and fair way (Integrity). For instance, concerns about the UPC judges’ impartiality and independence may impact perceptions of the UPC’s benevolence and integrity. The key objective of this paper is to reconceptualize the ABI-model and to propose a new model based on the ABI-model tailored to the judicial context. The paper draws on the theoretical and empirical literature on the institutional design of courts and the empirical trust literature that uses the ABI-model.