Hi,

I'm looking for the number of judges per country.  The more accurate
and recent the better, but I'm not going to be picky.

Thank you.

-Mao

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 28 Apr 2005 17:53 PDT

The World Bank maintains a database on the number of judges per
country, but it is not comprehensive:


http://www4.worldbank.org/legal/database/Justice/Pages/jsIndicator1.htm


What additional info would you need to make for a complete answer to your question?

pafalafa-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by pafalafa-ga on 28 Apr 2005 18:42 PDT

At the link I gave you, you'll need to click on the text that says:


Judicial Personnel and Salaries - Number of Judges / Total Judicial Personnel 


to see the actual data.


paf

Mao,

I found an even better resource for you at the United Nations Office
of Drugs and Crime.

Their most recent survey on crime and the judicial systems around the
world includes fairly comprehensive data on the numbers of judges in
many countries.


The data from their March 2005 report can be seen here:



http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/eighthsurvey/8sv.pdf
Section 8:  Judges, by status and sex, and financial resources,
including in appeal courts



The data, in an Excel spreadsheet, can be seen here:


http://home.ripway.com/2005-3/279856/judges2.xls



and comes from the Eight Annual UNODC survey, which can be seen in its
entirely here:


http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime_cicp_survey_eighth.html
United Nations Surveys on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal
Justice Systems
Eighth Survey 


I trust this information fully meets your needs.  However, if you find
you still need any additional information, just let me know by posting
a Request for Clarification, and I'm at your service.

Thanks for an interesting question,


pafalafa-ga


search strategy -- Google search on [ international (statistics OR
database) "judges per" ]

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Request for Answer Clarification by 6ra3-ga on 29 Apr 2005 03:41 PDT

Hello Pafalafa,

Great work! :-)  Seems like they cover the 2001 to 2002 period.  Is
there more recent data?

I'll take this data as sufficient if you can't find more recent data
and it's worth five stars for me. :-)

Thank you.

-Mao

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Clarification of Answer by pafalafa-ga on 29 Apr 2005 05:23 PDT

Mao,

The short answer is "No", I don't believe there is any data more
recent than the 2001-2002 data the UN provided.

Their report only came out a month ago, so it certainly is pretty
up-to-date in that respect.  Since this was data collected by a survey
effort of the UN (rather than say, a collation of readily available
data, like current interests rates), it just takes a long time to get
the data in, work it up, and present it in a report.  It's not unusual
for the lag time to be several years, as appears to be the case with
this data.

I always prefer myself to have the most recent numbers on hand, but I
think in this case, you probably have them already.

Let me know if there's anything else I can do to clarify this for you.

All the best,

paf

I can now appreciate the results and the lag time needed to compile
the collected data. :-)

Great work!

-Mao

Greetings 6ra3-ga,
Pafalafa has answered your question completely, and the first UN site
very helpfully provides statistics on the number of judges per 100,000
population
(as does the World Bank site in the clarification, which however only
counts federal judges, putting USA near the bottom of the list).
The great variance in these figures on table 8.1 of the UN site, Prof.
Judges, suggests that there must be significant differences between
the legal systems in the countries  - per 100,000:  UK 2.25, US 10.98,
Germany 25.34.

Maybe comparing the figures is not comparing apples and oranges; let
the judges all be citrus fruit, but then there are oranges, lemons,
grapefruits and other varieties.  If you are interested, I could
expand with a brief layman's explanation of the specialized courts in
Germany.
But if you are interested in a researcher's substantiated answer, it
would be a very interesting question for one of them.
Regards

Hello Myoarin,

Thank you very much for clearing that up for me, yes I'm very
interested in your explanation if you're willing. :-)

-Mao

Thanks Mao for the thoughtful and generous feedback.  Hope to see you
back here sometime soon.

And thanks, too, to myoarin, for adding some good perspective on the UN report.


paf

Thanks for your interest.

Germany has local courts and two levels of courts of appeal in each
state ("Land", e.g. Bavaria, and apparently in Berlin  - also a state
- a separate criminal court); courts that only handle cases relating
to social support issues; others for family issues (divorce,
childcare); for labor relations (employee vs employer and vice versa);
cases relating to government administration;  plus related courts of
appeal, including federal courts of final appeal in these categories.

Lots of judges, and in the higher courts, 3 or 5 sitting on the bench,
whereby in the the lower special courts, there will be one
professional judge and the others persons with professional experience
in the field (personnel managers on the bench for labor relations, for
example, but the decision is based on a vote of them all).  These
persons probably count in the statistic for non-prof. judges in a
later table on that site.
At the highest level, the federal courts, there are again many judges
in different groups.  In the Verfassungsgericht (that would be more or
less equivalent to the US Supreme Court) these are responsible for
different sectors of the law(s).  Are there conflicts in decisions? 
There is a system to try to avoid them.

A personal comment:  Does having so many courts result in quicker
justice?  It sure does not seem so.  Either the laws give rise to more
cases, or the populace goes to court more often (no offense intended,
but maybe because in Germany a lot of people have insurance that
covers legal costs), or maybe it is just Parkinson's law about
bureaucracies always finding enough to do.
It makes me appreciate the US Constitution's call for a "fair and SPEEDY trail."

I won't be in the least offended if a German commenter or researcher
(scriptor-ga, politicalguru-ga) wants to correct this.