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10 IJCA [i] (2019)

handle is hein.journals/ijca10 and id is 1 raw text is: In this Issue:' From the Executive Editor. Financing the Judiciary in the Netherlands: between work overload in the courts and government control of the Judicial Budget. By Philip Langbroek Professional Articles: Ten Questions for Dory Reiling - Developing IT for Courts (Interviewed by Professor Anne Wallace) .........................1 Judges and Courts Respond to Opioid Litigation Engulfing U.S. Court Systems Markus B. Zimmer, Executive Editor ............... .......... 5 Academic Articles Italian Perspectives on the Judiciary By Giuseppe Franco Ferrari ............. ..... ......... 13 Funding the Judiciary: How Budgeting System Shapes Justice. A Comparative Analysis of Three Case Studies. By Federica Viapiana ............. ..... ......... 23 An Examination of How District Attorneys Perceive Justice Jackie Chavez, PhD ............. ..... ......... 35 Effective Court Administration and Professionalism of Judges as Necessary Factors Safeguarding the Mother of Justice - The Right to a Fair Trial By Mindaugas Simonis ............. ..... ......... 47 What Judges Think About the Meaning of Their Work Ricardo Augusto Ferreira e Silva, Tomas de Aquino Guimaraes, Marcos de Moraes Sousa ............. ..... ......... 59 Organizational and Process Improvements of Investment Processes Administered by Courts in the Czech Republic Viktora Martin, Spa6ek Miroslav ............. ..... ......... 67 Volume 10, Issue 1, Winter 2019 ISSN 2156-7964 URL http://www.iacajournal.org Cite this as: DO: 10. 1 8352/IJCA.292 Copyright: From the Managing Editor: Financing the Judiciary in the Netherlands: between work overload in the courts and government control ofthe Judicial Budget. By Philip Langbroek, Managing Editor In terms of legal regulations, the Netherlands has a well-balanced but complicated system for financing the judicial functions of government. Judicial appropriations are determined by the collective production of the ordinary courts, the Central Appeal Board, and the Trade and Industry Appeals Tribunal. Different formula rates are applied to each jurisdiction. For example, Plural Judge Panel cases deliver far more money than cases that are decided by a single judge. Below, I argue why, from a constitutional perspective, the appropriations process for funding the Dutch judiciary has undesirable consequences for the functioning of judges and courts. Those consequences flow from the manner in which the appropriations process has been developed and applied in practice by these players: the Ministry of Justice and Security, the Council for the Judiciary, the courts administration and the judges themselves. The financing system essentially functions as a business model rather than as a judicial and court-services model based on the effective administration of justice. It is striking that the judicial organization is treated by the government and parliament as any other government department. For the judicial organization, the production of the previous year determines budgets for the succeeding year. In the ministerial appropriations process, court production projections for the coming year drive budgetary allocations. For more work than planned, the judicial organization gets 70% of the amount set per case; 30% will be reduced for work levels that do not meet projections. This system also applies in the relationship between the Council for the Judiciary and the courts, as set forth in the Decree on Financing of the Courts, an Order in Council based on the Judicial Organization Act. The production of the courts is measured in minutes of working time. By type of case (for example, criminal case, plural judge panel, administrative law, provisional injunction; family case, etc., together 70 categories), surveys on time spent per category are carried out every few years. In this way, the average amount of minutes spent on a specific case type is determined. And the Minister of Justice determines the compensation per minute once every three years. Within this system, the more cases the courts dispose of, the more money they receive the following year. However, the total amount of money cannot grow larger than the total budget for the judiciary as it has been allocated by the budget bill as it was approved of by Parliament. The inventors of this system had also anticipated that this business model might yield some perverse incentives. That is why they proposed that the Council for the Judiciary and the court boards should monitor the quality of the court work. This involves measures such as consistency of judicial decision-making, timeliness, impartiality, permanent education, and so on. A separate system was devised for this quality control originally known as RechtspraaQ (JudiQuiary), a term no longer in use. The intention was that the results of the measurement system would be factored into the budget negotiations between the Council for the Judiciary and the Minister of Justice. With an annual budget of one billion Euro's and 1.9 million lawsuits, an average court case yields about 525 Euros. These cases are handled by some 9,000 FTE staff, of which some 2,300 FTE are judges; the rest comprise legal and administrative support staff. There are two major problems in this system. In the first place, the budget for the judiciary is determined by parliament as part of the Ministry of Justice and Security's budget, on the proposal prepared and submitted by the Minister of Justice. This is bound to the budget agreements in the Cabinet, based on the Government Accounts Act and the European Semester (an European Union oversight mechanism for Euro member states). So the Minister of Finance has a big finger in that porridge. That

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