Do we need more judges to speed up the justice system or is the problem too many lawyers? |
The recent report by the Law Society on Ireland’s justice system caused quite a stir. Rightly so. It should be a cause for concern when it takes three times longer than elsewhere in Europe for a case to make its way through the courts here. In the wider context, it is just another example of our seemingly chronic inability to get stuff done.
Much of the subsequent focus has been on the number of judges. Again, we are bottom of the class in Europe when it comes to number of judges per capita. Hiring more judges is obviously a sensible response, but it is perhaps worth considering whether our problem is not that we don’t have enough judges, but rather we have too many lawyers.
We certainly have a lot of lawyers. According to the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ), which is the source of much of the information in the Law Society report, we have 282 lawyers per 100,000 inhabitants. This is significantly higher than the European median of 172 per 100,000.
It’s a lot of lawyers and it must be related to one of the other CEPEJ findings – that we........