Land Reform in Court Proceedings? Local Judges and Land Reform in Colombia

This paper introduces the Judges and Agrarian Reform ( jAR ) dataset, a municipality-year panel that records the allocation of 11 761 public land lots -up to approximately 260 000 hectares- to private actors through a judicial mechanism distinct from the way estab- lished by the land reform, to wit, adverse possession. Our statistical and GIs analysis suggests that the judicial allocation of public land has had two opposing effects: Land accumulation and access to land for landless peasants. We focus on the former effect through the case studies of C & oacute;rdoba and Casanare. The jAR database provides novel nationwide data to explain the determinants and effects of the role of the judiciary in land reform implementation in Colombia.