Too Few Judges: Effects, Backlogs and Workloads (Program)
Eyal Katvan, Senior Lecturer, College of Law & Business (Israel) (Moderator); Keren Weinshall-Margel, Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel); and Fernando Galindo, University of Zaragoza (Spain)
Claims regarding the scarcity of judges and its consequences are an important issue in various jurisdictions. The concerns are that citizens and organizations may be denied access to justice; parties may suffer delays of justice; prosecutors may decline to prosecute more cases; judges may become overworked etc. This session investigates whether there is substance to the claims of a shortage of judges, and if so, the severity of the problem; it seeks out the sources of the problem; and examines the results of the attempts to solve it. This session intends to study the phenomenon by comparing different legal systems and the methods each one of them has found to address the problem.