If the judicial system was as bad as you say it is, I would exchange it for India's current judicial system in a jiffy.
There are a lot of things to be optimistic about India, the judiciary isn't one of them. In fact, the judiciary and the judges together are one of India's biggest blackpills, enough to override all other positives. I'm very bullish on India, and the one threat to India's rise that I see is the dilapidated and decayed judiciary.
The things you mention in this articles will be resolved by better legislation. There's no need to ask government permission to fire people. And more permissive legislation is on its way.
But there's no antidote to the slowness of the judicial system.
1. As you rightly pointed out, cases go on a long time. They often take more than a decade to get disposed off.
2. Due to the laggard rate of case disposal, laws are often used as harassment. I can simply accuse you of something and while you'll inevitably be found not guilty, you'll still have to visit the courts for many years.
3. Often, people's careers languish because they can't migrate while cases are pending. They still need to show up at their local courthouse.
4. Even worse is if the case is registered at a different location other than where you reside. Then you have to keep visiting that courthouse which might be out of state and a thousand miles away.
5. Judges are corrupt. Just recently, heavy wads of cash were found at a judge in the High Court (second highest court in the country) of Delhi (the capital). Registering a crime is extremely difficult because of the immunity judges have.
6. Judges choose successors themselves. There's extreme amounts of nepotism. Parliament tries to reform the process but the judicial system says that it is unconstitutional.
That's not even getting into how difficult it makes running a business in the country. Enforcing contracts is a joke. Only MNCs are able to do that because they have the money power necessary.
The poor resign themselves to constant court visits. Even family matters drag on and are used as weapons to tear families apart.
I could go on and on. What you have mentioned isn't even the worst part. It is 100x nastier than what this post implies.
Everything you mentioned is likely familiar to Indians, and they might even agree with your points. However, the challenge lies in the fact that they often struggle to implement solutions effectively. Instead, there is a continuous focus on policy discussions through think tanks and op-eds, advocating for more industrial policy and welfare measures.
At the core of the issue is ideology. A robust court system would empower Indians to address their own problems, whereas the current emphasis on policies tends to foster a dependency on the nanny state.
I find it amusing that Bangladeshi judges are sent to India for training. This seems akin to sending an economist to be trained in North Korea, highlighting a misalignment in the approach to judicial education and reform.
I'm not convinced low spending is the biggest problem. Brazil spends 1.3% of GDP on the justice system, which is bigger then it looks, and you could have written the same article about it. The deeper problem seems to me to be the poorly designed legislation that forces courts to micromanage ambiguities.
Take VAT credits in Brazil, permitted only for expenses "directly used in production." Does this include the electricity powering the manager’s office, or just the assembly line? What about uniforms provided to workers? When rules are this vague, suits become longer and more frequent, with judges becoming more discretionary, inviting appeals and clogging higher courts with petty disputes.
A real estate developer approached us in 1988 to build apartments on a plot of land that is owned by my family. We signed an agreement with his company in 1991 and he paid us the initial tranche of money. Since then he has built and sold multiple buildings on that plot without paying us any of the remaining tranches. Our court case against him has been going on for nearly 3 decade's without any measurable progress.
In fact, the man himself is dead and his son now manages the company. Multiple members of my family have also passed away while waiting for judicial relief. By the Lindy effect, I fully expect the case to keep going for another 30 years.
As an Indian who has also worked with the government on projects, I have noticed one thing: reforms, in any sector, inevitably need a crisis.
As a country with low state capacity, what tends to happen is that a crisis like situation forces our gargantuan State to problem solve. During this phase, resources are reallocated to 'solve' the problem. Think of the balance of payment crisis in '91; the insolvency and bankruptcy code following the NPA crisis around 2014; the fast tracking of court cases involving rape suceeeding the horrid Nirbhaya rape case. In each case, the solving happened to stablise the system and not to use that as a platform for deep, structural reform i.e. towards growth. Josh Felman, a keen observer of the Indian economy made this point and it applies beyond the economy.
Now, with the current Government's proclivity to find the next 'narrative', a way out clause if you will, where is the appetite for deep, structural reforms? It breaks my heart to see how we have taken the truism 'never waste a crisis' to the point where we almost invite it. One can only hpe that the next breed of reformers, like our '91 generation of public servants' are plugging away.
For anyone wanting to look at how this psyche plays out, I would recommend this tour de force breakdown of the Indian economy, courtesy Rajeshwari Sengupta, who also worked on the IBC law of 2016 and had an inside view of the piecemeal commitment towards reforming the system.
At least they abolished the Planning Commission. In many ways, India has less economic freedom than "Communist" China.
Other than the judicial system, India has a serious human capital problem.
"Chinese geniuses outnumber Indian geniuses by a factor of 400 to 1. Constructed school achievement scores in India are about 1.7 standard deviations below China’s, in line with the intelligence gap. Even if this IQ estimate is biased toward China by an order of magnitude, the top end of Chinese human capital still dwarfs India’s."
Interesting post. One minor quibble is that you state that "Being a descendant of the British system leaves them with a more formalistic legal system" and then cite Djankov et al, who state that "formalism is systematically greater in civil than in common law countries". But Britain is a common law country, so presumably India didn't inherit its legal formalism from English common law?
Good idea on the surface but think of the ramifications. Every lawyer, and every accused who is guilty, will try and delay each case to cross this 30-year window to be free. If current cases are averaging 5 years, you will have a much larger average.
On this thought though, all judges and lawyers and their staff should have some portion of their pay purely on incentives of completed cases. Again, there is room here for foul play, as in rushed judgments, or dismissals, but somehow this clogged up machine has to be oiled.
India is a diverse caste based society with an extremely small class of experts who are swamped with an extremely large class of illiterate manual laborers. The ratio is such that the Indian system cannot competently resolve all the issues that arise in a timely manner -- legal or otherwise. Thus, the country stagnates. That Indian immigrants are competent makes this problem worse, as it implies the brain drain of the very experts most capable of fixing the problems. Assuming that there is such a thing as an "Indian" and that all Indian populations have equal human capital is erroneous.
Oh le based HBD has arrived. Do you seriously think that the job of a judge is so g-loaded that India could not find 200 people *per million* to do it, were she to actually try?
The more you claim that I am pushing "HBD" (I am not, culture is real and history matters and sociology and institutions exist), the more you create racists through your uneducated conflation.
Nice way to evade the point. Cool, do any of the totally non-biologically reasons you have in mind make it more plausible that India cannot find 200 adequate people per million to staff their courts?
Feigning outrage and 2016 alt-right memes abt "you are the real racist" does not make any of your nonsense any more cogent, I fear
I never said you're racist, I said you're a shrieking harpy. And yes, human capital allocation is limited. Opportunity cost exists, and when you sap smart people through dysfunction and brain drain, you have less smart-people-hours to spend on basic services.
edit: the true retardation of your argument is that it is self-defeating: "Do you seriously think that the job of a judge is so g-loaded that India could not find 200 people *per million* to do it, were she to actually try?"
It's not about "lack of effort." It's about lack of competence. Having enough lawyers and paying them well enough is itself a task which requires intelligence.
I think the rate at which the country's human capital quality is improving is likely significantly greater than the rates at which the ratio of judges per million people has grown.
I think most of that capital is headed overseas or trying to solve basic problems of utilities -- plumbing and electricity. Not much time left over for legal cases.
People would love to be a judge if more positions are opened up. It's a very high status job. The problem is not that sufficient number of good quality people are not available.
You forgot to mention that the judges are also very corrupt. The delays etc are all manufactured to elicit maximum rent out of people who can pay for expediting or delaying. If you hire more civil servants, the corruption is likely to increase. At the highest level, judiciary is politicised. At its lower level, it is a tool of the haves to squeeze the have nots. Combined with a corrupt police force, they are a noose around the public’s neck.
Very well written. The British system was based on stare decisis- a decision in one case applies in all similar cases- and Res Judicata- once a case is decided the matter can't be relitigated. Lawyers don't want either to be implemented because it is easier to continue earning a little from the same case or class of cases, rather than moving on and finding some currently undecided type of case. Judges at the higher level are recruited from the Bar and tend to pander to them. This also means that they deny 'doctrine of political question', claim infinite 'inherent power' and pretend that they alone know the 'basic structure of the constitution'. They like grandstanding and support 'Public Interest Litigation'. They don't care that their judgments are ignored or that the legal services industry in India is now worth only half the value of tiny Singapore! Indeed, a lot of lucrative Indian work is now done in Singapore not India. The Bench is accommodative to this. It will enforce arbitration decisions made outside the country- unless it decides not to and creates new law which it applies retrospectively! But, if you don't like the outcome, submit a review petition. The Bench is happy to overrule itself!
It is also true that the courts are shitty because the law is shitty. This means that a lot of business is transacted informally and informal enforcement is effective. To give an example, forty years ago, a gold smuggler who made a delivery in Bombay found the transaction went very smoothly. The facilitators charged about a one percent commission. The same gold smuggler legally importing equipment for his factory- for which he had got all licenses- had to wait six months and pay about 10 percent in 'black money' to get his shipment released from the State owned warehouse. Older people thought he had got off lightly! Still, his 'white' business was unprofitable because of labour problems and bribes demanded by factory inspectors etc. On top of that there were high taxes. As a result, the 'white' business is just for show. You make your money in 'black'. Also, you don't have to pay back your bank loans or indeed arrears of wages. Your creditors are welcome to sue you. You are suing your debtors. Your lawyer will get an adjournment unless the other guy's lawyer gets it first. The thing will drag on for thirty years.
One final point, a lot of Court cases involve one Government agency suing another Government agency. Moreover 90 percent of lawyers earn their living doing 'bureaucratic facilitation'. In other words the Judiciary is parasitic on a parasitic State apparatus. Judges have zero interest in remedying the situation. They want to pose as great, bleeding heart, public intellectuals. Then they retire and are mocked. It is obvious that the purpose of the Bench is to permit delay and a kicking of the can down the road. But it is losing its efficacy as a tool of harassment. It is easy to disintermediate the legal system in one way or another. After all, lawyers and Judges tend to back off if you make them an offer they can't refuse. Alternatively, if you have money, you can offshore your assets and disintermediate the Indian legal system. But this means that the Law, as a Service Industry, shrinks relative to other Knowledge Based industries. This means the quality of lawyers and judges falls. Indians end up importing legal services from abroad- i.e. get their business transacted in foreign jurisdictions- while crazy ideologues bring more and more nuisance 'PIL' suits. In theory, any District Magistrate, by passing a jail sentence of defamatiion with a 2 year jail sentence, can cause ALL legislators from having to resign. They would also be barred from contesting elections for a term of years! This is a crazy situation- just as crazy as the Supreme Court saying it can jail a foreign diplomat! My point is that there is a reason the Indian Bench is reviled. It is ignorant of the law. Its purpose is to advertise the utter futility of going to law- serve to delay judgment or as a tool of harrassment.
Just recently, a senior advocate said that the Bench was corrupt and in the pocket of the present Government. He was threatened with a jail sentence for contempt. He repeated his allegations. The Bench backed down and imposed a miniscule fine which his lawyer failed. The advocate had done the Bench a favour. He had advertised its utter uselessness. Sadly, since everybody already knew this, he gained no political advantage.
I asked my mother about this article and she suggested that there wasn’t that much of an issue with hiring new people because if they get unruly and try to loot you, you can hire people to beat them up (as a sort of shadow law enforcement). Maybe this depends on the state, but it seemed logical to me, as a way to gain state capacity.
The problem is the general lack of ethics in the country. This is the root cause of its institutions not working right. The decay and tedium of the judiciary is only a symptom of a larger and seller rot in the moral fabric of the country.
1. Institutions != governance. India's judiciary is institutionally very similar to the British one, but much less functional simply because it's underfunded and because procedural minutiae (like allowing indefinite new court dates) end up snowballing
2. Where ethics does not do, incentives do. Today's culture shapes governance, tomorrow's culture is shaped by it. Were the State to seriously commit to its fundamental role of adjudicating disputes, many unethical actors would soon learn that fraud does not pay, and raise kids on this principle.
From my understanding, it is not true that there are 18,000 (or even 1 or 2) cases pending for 30 or more years in the Supreme Court. It resolves all granted cases within 2 terms maximum usually. I find it incredibly hard to believe that 1000s of unresolved matters pile up each decade.
For people thinking it can't be as bad as all that, it's worse.
This is something I’ve found — that everyone from India has either had a bad experience with the courts, or has someone in their family who has.
If the judicial system was as bad as you say it is, I would exchange it for India's current judicial system in a jiffy.
There are a lot of things to be optimistic about India, the judiciary isn't one of them. In fact, the judiciary and the judges together are one of India's biggest blackpills, enough to override all other positives. I'm very bullish on India, and the one threat to India's rise that I see is the dilapidated and decayed judiciary.
The things you mention in this articles will be resolved by better legislation. There's no need to ask government permission to fire people. And more permissive legislation is on its way.
But there's no antidote to the slowness of the judicial system.
1. As you rightly pointed out, cases go on a long time. They often take more than a decade to get disposed off.
2. Due to the laggard rate of case disposal, laws are often used as harassment. I can simply accuse you of something and while you'll inevitably be found not guilty, you'll still have to visit the courts for many years.
3. Often, people's careers languish because they can't migrate while cases are pending. They still need to show up at their local courthouse.
4. Even worse is if the case is registered at a different location other than where you reside. Then you have to keep visiting that courthouse which might be out of state and a thousand miles away.
5. Judges are corrupt. Just recently, heavy wads of cash were found at a judge in the High Court (second highest court in the country) of Delhi (the capital). Registering a crime is extremely difficult because of the immunity judges have.
6. Judges choose successors themselves. There's extreme amounts of nepotism. Parliament tries to reform the process but the judicial system says that it is unconstitutional.
That's not even getting into how difficult it makes running a business in the country. Enforcing contracts is a joke. Only MNCs are able to do that because they have the money power necessary.
The poor resign themselves to constant court visits. Even family matters drag on and are used as weapons to tear families apart.
I could go on and on. What you have mentioned isn't even the worst part. It is 100x nastier than what this post implies.
The average IQ of 78 in India's population probably has something to do with it.
The 78 IQ bit is widely debunked already. Just one example here - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/26vfb_v1
Maybe get your own IQ tested :)
Everything you mentioned is likely familiar to Indians, and they might even agree with your points. However, the challenge lies in the fact that they often struggle to implement solutions effectively. Instead, there is a continuous focus on policy discussions through think tanks and op-eds, advocating for more industrial policy and welfare measures.
At the core of the issue is ideology. A robust court system would empower Indians to address their own problems, whereas the current emphasis on policies tends to foster a dependency on the nanny state.
I find it amusing that Bangladeshi judges are sent to India for training. This seems akin to sending an economist to be trained in North Korea, highlighting a misalignment in the approach to judicial education and reform.
LOL
I'm not convinced low spending is the biggest problem. Brazil spends 1.3% of GDP on the justice system, which is bigger then it looks, and you could have written the same article about it. The deeper problem seems to me to be the poorly designed legislation that forces courts to micromanage ambiguities.
Take VAT credits in Brazil, permitted only for expenses "directly used in production." Does this include the electricity powering the manager’s office, or just the assembly line? What about uniforms provided to workers? When rules are this vague, suits become longer and more frequent, with judges becoming more discretionary, inviting appeals and clogging higher courts with petty disputes.
Brazil is much richer than India, however. India getting to a Brazil-level of development would actually reshape the entire global economy!
I looked this up and Brazil's GDP per capita is 4.15 times more than India's according to 2023 data.
“Every family has a horror story.”
That is piercingly true. Here’s ours.
A real estate developer approached us in 1988 to build apartments on a plot of land that is owned by my family. We signed an agreement with his company in 1991 and he paid us the initial tranche of money. Since then he has built and sold multiple buildings on that plot without paying us any of the remaining tranches. Our court case against him has been going on for nearly 3 decade's without any measurable progress.
In fact, the man himself is dead and his son now manages the company. Multiple members of my family have also passed away while waiting for judicial relief. By the Lindy effect, I fully expect the case to keep going for another 30 years.
As an Indian who has also worked with the government on projects, I have noticed one thing: reforms, in any sector, inevitably need a crisis.
As a country with low state capacity, what tends to happen is that a crisis like situation forces our gargantuan State to problem solve. During this phase, resources are reallocated to 'solve' the problem. Think of the balance of payment crisis in '91; the insolvency and bankruptcy code following the NPA crisis around 2014; the fast tracking of court cases involving rape suceeeding the horrid Nirbhaya rape case. In each case, the solving happened to stablise the system and not to use that as a platform for deep, structural reform i.e. towards growth. Josh Felman, a keen observer of the Indian economy made this point and it applies beyond the economy.
Now, with the current Government's proclivity to find the next 'narrative', a way out clause if you will, where is the appetite for deep, structural reforms? It breaks my heart to see how we have taken the truism 'never waste a crisis' to the point where we almost invite it. One can only hpe that the next breed of reformers, like our '91 generation of public servants' are plugging away.
For anyone wanting to look at how this psyche plays out, I would recommend this tour de force breakdown of the Indian economy, courtesy Rajeshwari Sengupta, who also worked on the IBC law of 2016 and had an inside view of the piecemeal commitment towards reforming the system.
https://seenunseen.in/episodes/2024/6/24/episode-387-the-life-and-times-of-the-indian-economy/
At least they abolished the Planning Commission. In many ways, India has less economic freedom than "Communist" China.
Other than the judicial system, India has a serious human capital problem.
"Chinese geniuses outnumber Indian geniuses by a factor of 400 to 1. Constructed school achievement scores in India are about 1.7 standard deviations below China’s, in line with the intelligence gap. Even if this IQ estimate is biased toward China by an order of magnitude, the top end of Chinese human capital still dwarfs India’s."
https://zixuanma.blog/p/22-million-geniuses-chinas-greatest
Interesting post. One minor quibble is that you state that "Being a descendant of the British system leaves them with a more formalistic legal system" and then cite Djankov et al, who state that "formalism is systematically greater in civil than in common law countries". But Britain is a common law country, so presumably India didn't inherit its legal formalism from English common law?
> The Supreme Court has 69,000 piled up, waiting for resolution. Of these, 180,000 have been pending for more than thirty years.
180,000 > 69,000
They should have a statute of limitations, if a case is not resolved in 30 years it automatically gets dismissed.
Good idea on the surface but think of the ramifications. Every lawyer, and every accused who is guilty, will try and delay each case to cross this 30-year window to be free. If current cases are averaging 5 years, you will have a much larger average.
On this thought though, all judges and lawyers and their staff should have some portion of their pay purely on incentives of completed cases. Again, there is room here for foul play, as in rushed judgments, or dismissals, but somehow this clogged up machine has to be oiled.
India is a diverse caste based society with an extremely small class of experts who are swamped with an extremely large class of illiterate manual laborers. The ratio is such that the Indian system cannot competently resolve all the issues that arise in a timely manner -- legal or otherwise. Thus, the country stagnates. That Indian immigrants are competent makes this problem worse, as it implies the brain drain of the very experts most capable of fixing the problems. Assuming that there is such a thing as an "Indian" and that all Indian populations have equal human capital is erroneous.
Oh le based HBD has arrived. Do you seriously think that the job of a judge is so g-loaded that India could not find 200 people *per million* to do it, were she to actually try?
The more you claim that I am pushing "HBD" (I am not, culture is real and history matters and sociology and institutions exist), the more you create racists through your uneducated conflation.
Nice way to evade the point. Cool, do any of the totally non-biologically reasons you have in mind make it more plausible that India cannot find 200 adequate people per million to staff their courts?
Feigning outrage and 2016 alt-right memes abt "you are the real racist" does not make any of your nonsense any more cogent, I fear
I never said you're racist, I said you're a shrieking harpy. And yes, human capital allocation is limited. Opportunity cost exists, and when you sap smart people through dysfunction and brain drain, you have less smart-people-hours to spend on basic services.
edit: the true retardation of your argument is that it is self-defeating: "Do you seriously think that the job of a judge is so g-loaded that India could not find 200 people *per million* to do it, were she to actually try?"
It's not about "lack of effort." It's about lack of competence. Having enough lawyers and paying them well enough is itself a task which requires intelligence.
I think the rate at which the country's human capital quality is improving is likely significantly greater than the rates at which the ratio of judges per million people has grown.
I think most of that capital is headed overseas or trying to solve basic problems of utilities -- plumbing and electricity. Not much time left over for legal cases.
People would love to be a judge if more positions are opened up. It's a very high status job. The problem is not that sufficient number of good quality people are not available.
I agree, it sounds like an easy problem to solve, but India is fundamentally mismanaged... due to a lack of human capital in its governing system.
You forgot to mention that the judges are also very corrupt. The delays etc are all manufactured to elicit maximum rent out of people who can pay for expediting or delaying. If you hire more civil servants, the corruption is likely to increase. At the highest level, judiciary is politicised. At its lower level, it is a tool of the haves to squeeze the have nots. Combined with a corrupt police force, they are a noose around the public’s neck.
Very well written. The British system was based on stare decisis- a decision in one case applies in all similar cases- and Res Judicata- once a case is decided the matter can't be relitigated. Lawyers don't want either to be implemented because it is easier to continue earning a little from the same case or class of cases, rather than moving on and finding some currently undecided type of case. Judges at the higher level are recruited from the Bar and tend to pander to them. This also means that they deny 'doctrine of political question', claim infinite 'inherent power' and pretend that they alone know the 'basic structure of the constitution'. They like grandstanding and support 'Public Interest Litigation'. They don't care that their judgments are ignored or that the legal services industry in India is now worth only half the value of tiny Singapore! Indeed, a lot of lucrative Indian work is now done in Singapore not India. The Bench is accommodative to this. It will enforce arbitration decisions made outside the country- unless it decides not to and creates new law which it applies retrospectively! But, if you don't like the outcome, submit a review petition. The Bench is happy to overrule itself!
It is also true that the courts are shitty because the law is shitty. This means that a lot of business is transacted informally and informal enforcement is effective. To give an example, forty years ago, a gold smuggler who made a delivery in Bombay found the transaction went very smoothly. The facilitators charged about a one percent commission. The same gold smuggler legally importing equipment for his factory- for which he had got all licenses- had to wait six months and pay about 10 percent in 'black money' to get his shipment released from the State owned warehouse. Older people thought he had got off lightly! Still, his 'white' business was unprofitable because of labour problems and bribes demanded by factory inspectors etc. On top of that there were high taxes. As a result, the 'white' business is just for show. You make your money in 'black'. Also, you don't have to pay back your bank loans or indeed arrears of wages. Your creditors are welcome to sue you. You are suing your debtors. Your lawyer will get an adjournment unless the other guy's lawyer gets it first. The thing will drag on for thirty years.
One final point, a lot of Court cases involve one Government agency suing another Government agency. Moreover 90 percent of lawyers earn their living doing 'bureaucratic facilitation'. In other words the Judiciary is parasitic on a parasitic State apparatus. Judges have zero interest in remedying the situation. They want to pose as great, bleeding heart, public intellectuals. Then they retire and are mocked. It is obvious that the purpose of the Bench is to permit delay and a kicking of the can down the road. But it is losing its efficacy as a tool of harassment. It is easy to disintermediate the legal system in one way or another. After all, lawyers and Judges tend to back off if you make them an offer they can't refuse. Alternatively, if you have money, you can offshore your assets and disintermediate the Indian legal system. But this means that the Law, as a Service Industry, shrinks relative to other Knowledge Based industries. This means the quality of lawyers and judges falls. Indians end up importing legal services from abroad- i.e. get their business transacted in foreign jurisdictions- while crazy ideologues bring more and more nuisance 'PIL' suits. In theory, any District Magistrate, by passing a jail sentence of defamatiion with a 2 year jail sentence, can cause ALL legislators from having to resign. They would also be barred from contesting elections for a term of years! This is a crazy situation- just as crazy as the Supreme Court saying it can jail a foreign diplomat! My point is that there is a reason the Indian Bench is reviled. It is ignorant of the law. Its purpose is to advertise the utter futility of going to law- serve to delay judgment or as a tool of harrassment.
Just recently, a senior advocate said that the Bench was corrupt and in the pocket of the present Government. He was threatened with a jail sentence for contempt. He repeated his allegations. The Bench backed down and imposed a miniscule fine which his lawyer failed. The advocate had done the Bench a favour. He had advertised its utter uselessness. Sadly, since everybody already knew this, he gained no political advantage.
I asked my mother about this article and she suggested that there wasn’t that much of an issue with hiring new people because if they get unruly and try to loot you, you can hire people to beat them up (as a sort of shadow law enforcement). Maybe this depends on the state, but it seemed logical to me, as a way to gain state capacity.
The problem is the general lack of ethics in the country. This is the root cause of its institutions not working right. The decay and tedium of the judiciary is only a symptom of a larger and seller rot in the moral fabric of the country.
1. Institutions != governance. India's judiciary is institutionally very similar to the British one, but much less functional simply because it's underfunded and because procedural minutiae (like allowing indefinite new court dates) end up snowballing
2. Where ethics does not do, incentives do. Today's culture shapes governance, tomorrow's culture is shaped by it. Were the State to seriously commit to its fundamental role of adjudicating disputes, many unethical actors would soon learn that fraud does not pay, and raise kids on this principle.
From my understanding, it is not true that there are 18,000 (or even 1 or 2) cases pending for 30 or more years in the Supreme Court. It resolves all granted cases within 2 terms maximum usually. I find it incredibly hard to believe that 1000s of unresolved matters pile up each decade.
Interesting and good post, Nicholas D