Who wins in the ‘quality of justice’? The redistributive effects of two waves of judicial reform in Italy

ABSTRACT

The quality of justice is nowadays one of the central and most debated issues on the agenda of international and European politics. In many ways, speaking of rights and judicial politics in terms of the courts’ performance reduces the potential for conflict political actors and regulators encounter when they embark on reform of the court system. Italy provides an example of this phenomenon; yet very little has been said about the potential spill over or the unintended effects the quality of justice-oriented agenda has had on the political system. The present article fills this gap by referring to fresh data drawn from a long-running research project the author is carrying on.

KEYWORDS:

• Quality of justice
• Governance
• Indicators
• Italian courts
• Italian politics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It should be highlighted at this point that the judicial independence considered here in this paragraph is the institutional and external independence of the judiciary, i.e. what Russell (2010) refers to as independence from the executive branch formalised in corresponding legal provisions. Other dimensions of judicial independence are considered by scholars. They include behavioural independence, which is measured on the basis of behaviours rather than legal provisions. Then, there is internal independence, which refers to the relationship that each judge has with the higher courts or higher ranking judges. See on this Voigt (2005).

2. In Guarnieri and Pederzoli (2002) this is called the neo-Latin model, because it was first adopted by the Southern European countries. Councils for the judiciary have been set up in almost all of the democracies resulting from the third wave of democratisation – in Latin America and in the Southern European countries – and from the democratic transitions which took place immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Countries such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania decided to entrench them in the constitutions they adopted between 1989 and 1991 (Piana, 2010).

3. Innovation has become a common response when policy makers have been asked to resolve the problems of the judicial sector, such as unreasonable timeframes, inadequate or unfair access to the courts, the public’s lack of confidence in the bench, etc. This has entailed a growing commitment to new organisational practices and policies, originating in other systems or offices, within the traditional systems of judicial governance. We will now observe the flourishing of specialised groups working within the CEPEJ, whose mandate spans from singling out a check list for quality management to monitoring the implementation of user-oriented tools to support the transfer of policies and organisational practices through a network of pilot courts – where pilot refers to a keenness to innovate organisational structures.

4. Although the structural funds programme ended in 2013 we assume that the initiatives for projects funded under the programme will have been taken no later than one year before its end.