Claims regarding the scarcity of judges and its consequences are an important issue in various jurisdictions. The concerns are that citizens and organizations may be denied access to justice; that parties may suffer delays of justice; that prosecutors may decline to prosecute more cases; and that judges may become overworked etc. This workshop investigated whether there is substance to the claims of a shortage of judges, and if so, the severity of the problem; it sought out the sources of the problem; established its social price; and proposed solutions to it. We studied the phenomenon, both by comparing different legal systems and the methods each one of them has found to address the problem, as well as by exploring different perspectives: those of researchers, of the judiciary, etc. Papers presented at the workshop, exposed the data (not always publicly-available and accessible) and examined it, considered the sources of the problem, and the consequences of the undersupply of judges (pros and cons), and then proposed various solutions.
We have had good discussions on the issue of "Too few judges". The dynamic of the workshop echoed of a previous Onati workshop on "Too many lawyers". These two issues are inter-related, and in both cases, we noticed that the question (of either too many lawyers or too few judges) leads to a complex set of questions, such as "who is a judge" (similar to "who is a lawyer"). The papers that were presented in the last workshop revealed many common themes, which exemplified the complexity of the issue, its causes and solutions: the personality of the judge; defining shortage of diversity as a "too few judges" phenomena; the need for diversity as a solution to the problem; technological changes as a solution; and the hiring non-judges as judges; the need for data, and new means for measuring "judicial workload"; access to justice and the balance between efficiency and justice.
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