A common assumption: inefficiency and vacancy in the judiciary
The most common assumption in the Serbian legal public is that the relative inefficiency of the Serbian judicial system is caused by the number of vacant judicial seats and the small absolute number of judges. The official standpoint of the Supreme Court of Cassation in Serbia is the same:
“There are significantly fewer judges than there should be”[i].
Also, the public discourse is littered with claims that the policies and strategies for increasing judicial efficiency should focus on increasing the number of judges and courts. Under these assumptions, the strategies for developing the judiciary focus on the number of judges and ways for increasing it, since the prevailing belief suggests that the problem of inefficiency could be addressed simply by appointing new judges. Stephen Reinhardt, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, described the problem as follows:
“You do not need long-range studies, extensive surveys, caseload measurement, or other bureaucratic techniques to learn the answer to our problem. There are simply far too few of us to do the job properly”[ii].
Testing the assumption with empirical data: comparative analysis with the Serbian case
However, the relationship between judicial efficiency and the number of judges is not straightforward as it may seem at first glance. This is shown by the results obtained from an extensive comparative analysis between the organisation of the judicial system and its efficiency in Serbia and judicial efficiency in two former-Yugoslav countries (Croatia and Slovenia) and three European civil law countries (France, Austria and Norway). The empirical basis of the analysis consists of data collected under the 2020 Evaluation cycle (2018 data) of the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ)[iii] and the 2018 World Justice Report by the World Justice Project (WJP)[iv].
Results show that the complexity of the court network and the number of judges and other judicial personnel in the judicial system are not directly related to the efficiency of judicial systems. Significantly simpler judicial systems with fewer judges and non-judge staff (Norway) achieve better rule of law results than systems with more judges and more complex and branched court systems (Serbia, Croatia). Serbia shares the tradition of having a large number of courts, courts of special jurisdiction, professional judges, non-judge staff and public prosecutors with two other former Yugoslav countries – Croatia and Slovenia. France, Austria, and Norway have far less inflated judicial systems: Norway has 10.3 professional judges per 100,000 inhabitants, while France has 10.9 and Austria has 27.3. On the other hand, Serbia has 37.1; Croatia has 40.7, and Slovenia has 41.7.
According to the cited World Justice Report, Serbia has the least efficient justice system. The efficiency of justice in all analysed countries correlates with the results of the rule of law: as such, according to WJP, Norway – the most democratic country in the world – has the most efficient judicial system. Besides having expansive judicial systems, Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia have more incoming and resolved cases in civil and criminal matters. Even among the three post-Yugoslav countries, Serbia has the largest number of civil and criminal cases: it has 27 times more incoming and resolved criminal cases than Norway and Austria, 7 times more than Slovenia, and 5.2 times more than Croatia. The total number of criminal cases in front of the first instance courts in Serbia is 1,949,333, or 27.993 incoming criminal cases per 100 inhabitants. All other analysed countries have less than 200,000 incoming or resolved criminal cases in total for year 2020.
A provisional conclusion
This comparative analysis supports the claim that the network of basic courts in Serbia is not set up appropriately and that the disproportion in workload is so great that it cannot be justified either by the number of inhabitants or by the habits of addressing the court, or by the number of unfilled judicial positions. Therefore, a more comprehensive reform of the judicial network is necessary and that simple increasing of the number of judicial personnel is not enough and will not lead to desirable results.
Before making any strategic decisions regarding the improvement of the court network and its efficiency, a detailed analysis of the costs of court proceedings by judicial matter and instances, as well as other necessary analysis of loads of individual courts, judges and non-judges staff, are needed for the reforms to be based on factual data, and not on biased intuitions of the lay or expert public.
To read more about this, check out the full paper: Spaić, Bojan & Đorđević, Mila, “Less is More? On the Number of Judges and Judicial Efficiency” (2022).
My work on this blogpost results from research conducted within the Horizon Twinning project “Advancing Cooperation on The Foundations of Law – ALF” (project no. 101079177). This project is financed by the European Union.
Notes
[i] Vasović, J. (2022). “Nedovoljan broj sudijskih pomoćnika dodatno umanjio efikasnost obavljanja sudijske funkcije”, Dijalog.net (21-05-2022) [LINK].
[ii] Örkényi, L. (2022). “A New Method for an Objective Measurement of the Judicial Workload – the Application of a Prediction Model Based on an Algorithm Formed by Multiple Linear Regression in Court Administration” [LINK], citing Kleiman, M. et al (2017). “Case Weighting as a Common Yardstick: A Comparative Review of Current Uses and Future Directions” [LINK].
[iii] The European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), which was initiated by the Council of Europe, has published five waves of data reflecting the situation in up to 47 countries from 2004 regarding the judiciary.
[iv] The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index is the world’s leading source for original data on the rule of law. The 2020 edition covers 128 countries and jurisdictions, relying on more than 130,000 household and 4,000 expert surveys to measure how the rule of law is experienced and perceived in practical, everyday situations by the general public worldwide.
SUGGESTED CITATION: Đorđević, Mila: “Less Is More? On The Number of Judges and Judicial Efficiency“, FOLBlog, 2025/6/3, https://fol.ius.bg.ac.rs/2025/06/03/number-of-judges-and-judicial-efficiency/