Getting more judge with fewer drams Bryane Michael, Linacre College (Oxford) The material in this presentation is licensed by the author under a Creative Commons licence. Feel free to use as much of this material as you like for teaching or for critique. Graphics used in the presentation may be protected by proprietary copyright (which I use under “fair use”). I do not indemnify the user of these slides in case the holders of these proprietary copyrights capitalistically assert their property rights.

“What gets measured, gets done” New Public Management as EU “jurisprudence”? Statistics like army of investigators and auditors tells what to do, not how to do it (de gustibus non est disputandum) can “prove” people are doing stuff without even seeing them % prob. she overspent on unproductive excessive salaries 99.5% prob. he is no longer competent % prob. he held up cases 99.4% prob. these people are victims of discriminatory justice policies (either at law or by judges)

Other people are watching CoE CEPEJ  Com. Euro. Pour Effic. de la Justice - Res (2002)12  Markets for justice data (BEEPS, Global Integrity, etc.) Intl data help establish  budget priorities  budget efficiency  “measure” rendering of justice (wow!)

Using Statistics to Tell (Right or Wrong) a Story... Central Europe tends to pack courts France and Poland tend to keep-up fancy buildings FSU tends to be more balanced... Statistics lets us how much we allocate resources compared with others

The Justice of the Justice Sector Access as key issue for the CEPEJ  bunch of stats about access (civil, criminal legal-aid, etc)  fees as determinant of access Sometimes gustibus is disputandum...

Will the Real Court Stats Stand Up? EU stats hampered by typical “last ship” doctrine MSs much further Input-Output matrices as applied to Justice  time to register case  number of cases entering  number leaving (various ways)

Thats why Justice considered “Service Delivery” Economics = allocation of scarce resources to satisfy social want/need Same techniques used by corporations Plus eye on “protecting majority rule while defending rights of minorities” (def. of justice) at whatever cost Use original report graphics to show what they report

Bad Practice: The numbers speak for themselves Numbers never speak for themselves  graphics ensure that data at least analysed  help YOU to militate at political level for change Data mining  reports cases by type of trial in excruciating detail  difficult to see “overall picture” like in UK report USA wins again: lets you download data by justisdiction Do NOT throw tables of numbers at reader PLEASE!! French exceptionalism... at least they got the numbers...

EU practice likely to follow USA US has input-out structured data 7.3% cases of three years old on average courts here have a 99.9% prob. of being “not normal” change in overall filings = 4.3% vacant judgeship months = 424 felony hearings per year per judge = 85 percent of cases waiting longer than 3 years = 6.6%...though questionable benefit to US’s bizarre judicial system

Really Cool Stuff to Do with Court Stats Multiple Regression  finds observations 99.99% “out of normal”  finds patterns in order to make policy Applied Queueing theory  to allocate cases  “optimal” waiting time per court  optimal resource allocation per court 99.9% prob. more expensive because of non-random reasons... cheaper jurisdiction – maybe best practice to apply?

How Do We Do It in Armenia? Decree of the Minister of Justice establishing a statistics policy analysis unit  nominate ONE statistician  describe types of data courts must provide  describe handling of data  describe reports and follow up (internal audit)  data protection! Trainer to work with new chap to get system in place Your “MS” annual report (with more analysis and less raw data!) The decree writing class is on a different day...