POPULATION CRITERIA AND BUDGETARY DETERRANT: DETERMINING FACTORS IN THE QUALITY OF THE SPANISH CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

What is the quality of justice? As Melcarne and Ramello (2019) have recently pointed out, there is no clear interaction between quality and quantity in understanding or measuring judicial performance. However, the lack of human resources is often blamed for delays in the delivery of decisions (quantity) in most judicial systems - and could in fact mean a violation of the principle of due process. However, the study shows how difficult it is to assess quality, since even quantity (in fact calculable) cannot always be a trustful variable to measure it. In Spain, it is possible to assume that penal judges work more or less the same. Yet, not all judgments have the same quality. The problem is in the District Courts (some of insufficient size) with provincial criminal jurisdiction. They constantly run the risk - and do so - of breaching the principle of judicial impartiality. This does not happen in the Spanish Supreme Court or in the large District Courts. It is a problem in the judicial performance of justice and in the Administration of Justice. Yet, there are no budgetary or even regulatory stimuli to resolve this situation. A situation that implies a breach of the principles of due process and therefore of the fundamental rights of the accused.

International Judicial Performance and the Law of the Sea

In “Judicialization of the Sea: Bargaining under the UNCLOS Regime,” Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Andrew P. Owsiak examine the extent to which legalization and judicialization of the law of the sea has changed how states manage conflicts. They argue that legalization and judicialization have diminished maritime conflict because disputing parties are able to predict how a court would rule and, therefore, they will be more likely to bargain out-of-court to achieve more favorable outcomes. Their analysis suggests that how adjudicators perform as dispute resolution bodies is basically irrelevant. Drawing on the literature on the performance of international courts, this essay identifies numerous ways that the contribution of international courts to the resolution of disputes is contingent on key performance criteria, including legal clarification and compliance. When international courts perform at their best, judicialization enhances the impact of legalization. If performance is a contingent feature of international adjudication, then the generalizability of Mitchell and Owsiak's argument might be limited by the extent to which adjudicators achieve certain key performance criteria.

Judicial statistics and corporate structure of the Russian courts

The subject of this research is the impact of assessment of judicial performance in accordance with the indicators of judicial statistics upon the organization of culture of the Russian court, which incorporates the shared by majority of judges informal rules of conduct, traditions, and values. The article describes such criteria for assessment of judicial performance as “quality”, “quantity”, and “terms”. In studying the historical origin of judicial performance assessment based on judicial statistics, it is demonstrated that the tradition of such assessment was founded in the 1930s, when political leadership who carried out repressive policy instigated “socialistic competition” between the courts and the judges. The article analyzes the impact of the “struggle for statistics” upon conduct of judges. Such circumstance that in consideration of cases the judges take into account judicial statistics violate the requirement of procedural fairness. There is a contradiction between the Russian legislation, which for the most part complies with the universally recognized international principles, and conservative organizational culture of the Russian courts. Mechanism of reproduction of the latter is the inertia of the “struggle for statistics”. In order to bring into compliance the representations of Russian judges on the acceptable conduct with the values of democratic justice, the system of assessment of judicial performance requires revision.

Does Judicial Selection Affect Judicial Performance? Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Do judges selected by merit review commissions perform better than elected judges or those directly appointed by elected officials? This is a central question in both the academic study of state judicial institutions and the policy discourse about how to reform them. To address it, we take advantage of the variation in the means of the selection for trial court judges within Arizona, a state comprised of appointed, elected, and merit-selected trial court judges. This unique context allows us to use an objective measure of judicial performance – the reversal rate of trial court cases appealed to Arizona’s state appellate courts – to evaluate judges by their means of selection. We gather an original dataset on 2919 cases heard by 176 judges, estimating multivariate models that control for characteristics of cases and of judges. Overall, we find that elected judges have a lower reversal rate than merit-selected judges. Our findings question the conventional wisdom in the state courts literature in favor of merit selection and against judicial elections, and encourage further work on the effects of judges’ means of selection beyond state supreme courts to include state appellate and trial courts.