• Justice
• Assessing justice

Justice

The doctrine of judicial independence militates against formal external assessment of the performance of judges. Other constraints include a lack of established consensus on indicators of judicial best practice of what makes “a good judge.” Moreover, assessments of public satisfaction with judicial services are unavoidably qualitative and anecdotal.

Given these constraints, what methodologies, and associated indicators, should be selected to measure any reform or change initiative to enhancing the rule of law with validity, reliability and utility?

This paper proposes a two-tiered building-block approach to performance indicators be adopted to assess judicial reform projects in terms of its process and impacts.

• Process Indicators: These measure the implementation of a development project in terms of its efficiency and effort. These indicators are “internal” to the project and evaluate whether it is doing what it set out to do.
• Impact Indicators” – These indicators measure the effectiveness of project outputs in terms of their results or outcomes. They are “external” to the project, and describe objectively visible measures and how they contribute to enhancing the rule of law environment.

The paper concludes that a variety of performance indicators should be selected with which to “ triangulate” measurements of the contribution of judicial education to enhancing the quality of justice and rule of law. These indicators should combine process and impact evaluation techniques, subjective and objective criteria, and quantitative and qualitative data. Collectively, they change the anecdotal into the measurable.

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