Kammer oder Einzelrichter?

The chamber, according to the consensus in civil procedural literature, decides in a more balanced and objective manner and has a higher guarantee of correctness. However, in practice, the individual judge prevails. With the increased use of individual judges in the first instance, as stated in the justification for the Civil Procedure Reform Act of 2002, the quality of the first instance is improved. Why, based on which insights, is the chamber or the individual judge granted a higher guarantee of correctness? The civil procedural perspective remains attached to its paradigm when answering these questions and considers the situation solely from a procedural viewpoint. In contrast, when viewing the chamber as a group, statements can be made about the performance advantages of the chamber, as well as the individual, which partly go beyond what has been presented in the civil procedural discussion and complement it. However, this connection is rarely established in legal discourse. This paper attempts to make this connection. It shows that both individual judges and chambers bring potentials for judicial quality that still need to be discovered and developed. Guideline-based interviews with judges at five regional courts form the empirical basis for this work.