Citation
(2007), "Judge not", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 56 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2007.07956cab.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2007, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Judge not
In Australia (New South Wales) Chief Justice, Jim Spigelman recently gave his thoughts on performance measurement in a talk in which he suggested that strategic plans are a waste of time.
Each year the Productivity Commission in Australia publishes measures of judicial performance, but Justice Spigelman is determined to stop a push to extend the tables to include a “quality indicator”.
In a speech to the Australian Institute of Judicial Administration, Justice Spigelman said measuring court performance was futile. “There are significant areas of public decision-making – and the law is one of them – in which there is no measurable indicator of quality”, he said.
Fairness was difficult to count, as were impartiality, honesty and accessibility, but all were essential to the administration of justice.
“The danger of trying to measure justice”, he said, “was the managerial bias in favour of things that could be counted, and improvements that could be measured”.