Governing Magazine: Performance Based Assessment for Judges

Governing Magazine has an article exploring the possibility of changing the culture in the judiciary towards a system that includes “performance-based innovation.” The article states, “Excellence in organizations, particularly in the public sector, is achieved through creating the conditions for innovation: desired outcomes are clearly specified, performance is measured regularly so that there is an objective standard against which to gauge success, and a strong organizational culture encourages learning and experimentation. These are not the conditions that prevail in most of our courts: instead, roles, not outcomes, are defined; performance is measured merely by adherence to procedure; and the culture is focused on assigning credit or blame.” The piece continues, “When viewed through the lens of organizational science, courts boggle the mind. External sources (the voters or elected officials) select the ‘partners of the firm’ (the judges) with little or no input from the court or even any understanding of what needs a court may have. Judges’ vision of sharing power with each other is often no more than an office-sharing arrangement, as if they were solo-practitioner lawyers whose practice specialty is being a judge. The result is that it is a challenge for courts to establish and maintain a sense of unity, let alone an organizational culture of innovation.”

Source: Babak Armajani and Kevin Burke, Creating the Courts Americans Want, Governing Magazine, May 22, 2013.