Innovating Judicial Performance Evaluations: Toward Academic-Style Peer Review?

Evaluating judicial performances is a crucial, albeit often underappreciated element of judicial governance, as it incentivizes judges’ productivity and allows for meritocratic career advancement within the judiciary. At the same time, judicial performance evaluation remains a daunting task, plagued by different recurring issues. Alongside the controversial nature of judicial merit and conflicting expectations as to their ultimate goal, methods of judicial evaluation are often saddled with specific technological limitations, such as the risk of cognitive bias and data intelligibility. To overcome these shortcomings, it may be useful to start thinking of judicial performance in terms of other enterprises where merit is similarly hard to assess and measure objectively. A relevant example is the comparison with scholarly work, which resembles judicial activity in that both are goal-oriented enterprises where quality assessment proves somewhat elusive. Cognizant of the difficulties, however, researchers and academic institutions have long developed tools to overcome limitations. Associative thinking with scholarly research could thus yield positive ideas for innovating the assessment of judges’ work, one prime example being the import of scholarly blind “peer” review processes to judicial performance evaluations.