Some Thoughts on Judicial Reform

 

 

I have not read the current Israeli government’s judicial reform program in detail. But the current process for selecting Israeli judges—basically self-selection by extant judges is truly awful. (Other nations that use judicial self-selection include India and Pakistan.) So I am inclined to think that nearly anything that allows the parliament, government/cabinet, or prime minister to control or influence that process is a plus.

 

The problem with the government’s selection of judges (as I have observed in the U.S. and Ireland) is that the candidates are chosen for two reasons. Everyone knows about the first reason: party loyalty / ideological commitment. The second reason is: judges are picked for being the better/best practitioners who know how to successfully negotiate the extant legal system. The problem with the latter is that what is often desperately needed is not judges who can negotiate the legal system, but judges with the energy and wisdom to lead major programs of institutional revision in order to reform the legal system. Sometimes what is needed is root and branch reform. Otherwise, you may end up with idiots savants managing an asylum, but calling it a court system. Or, to put it another way, you have experts expertly managing a slow-moving, opaque, expensive (vis-a-vis litigants and taxpayers), and otherwise failed judicial system.

 

Seth Barrett, ‘Some Thoughts on Judicial Reform,’ New Reform Club (Feb. 6, 2023, 9:41 AM), <https://reformclub.blogspot.com/2023/02/some-thoughts-on-judicial-reform.html>;