The Case for Managed Judges: Learning from Japan after the Political Upheaval of 1993

Abstract

The Chief Justice of the United States supervises a vast judicial bureaucracy. He is the titular head of the judicial branch: 1200 judges with life tenure, 850 magistrate and bankruptcy judges, and 30,000 administrative staff members. The careers he can affect most are those of his administrative employees. Even the life-tenured judges, however, he can appoint to specialized judicial bodies. In doing all this, he supervises the Federal Judicial Conference with a budget of $5.4 billion. If the Chief Justice of the United States does much, his counterpart in Japan does much more. Not only does the Japanese Chief Justice supervise administrative employees, he also supervises the judicial personnel office called the Secretariat. In turn, the judges in the Secretariat control the jobs of the 3000 other national judges who decide cases. The American Chief Justice does not tell lower-court judges where to sit. Through the Secretariat, however, the Japanese Chief Justice does. The American Chief Justice does not decide how much the lower-court judges earn. Through the Secretariat, the Japanese Chief Justice does. Effectively, the Japanese Chief Justice exercises power over the career of every lower-court judge. All this he does as an appointee of a distinctly political Prime Minister. This is not an institutional structure likely to foster judicial independence. Nor, over the four decades during which the Liberal De-