Judges on the frontline: delivering justice under challenging managerial conditions

Colaux, Emilien [UCL] Moyson, Stéphane [UCL] Schiffino, Nathalie [UCL]

In Lispky's seminal work (1980/2010), judges in local courts represent a distinct category of street-level bureaucrats. Like other street-level bureaucrats, they directly interact with a lot of citizens, make quick decisions on many cases, and have a significant impact on the daily lives of litigants (Biland & Steinmetz, 2017). Unlike other street-level bureaucrats, the judicial system guarantees them functional independence. However, in the context of administrative reforms, judiciary management tends to reduce the resources of courts over time, whereas the workload is ever-increasing (Rothmayr Alisson, 2013). This is suspected to challenge the daily work of the frontline judges, but few research has been conducted on this topic. In what ways does judiciary management actually influence frontline judges’ practices? To address this research question, 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted with judges of the peace and police court judges in French-speaking Belgium. Based on the coding and thematic analysis of these interviews (Paillé & Mucchielli, 2016) using the NVivo software, we show, at the individual level, how the judges routinize and rationalize their cases. At the collective level, we demonstrate how justice is transformed and standardized when confronted with increasing workload, the inadequacy of human, financial and IT resources as well as various administrative reforms. Empirically, we test the often stated but rarely substantiated critique related to the (negative) effects of managerialization on street-level public services in the judicial sector. Theoretically, this research reinforces the early studies adopting an SLB approach to frontline judges. Overall, our results contribute to a better understanding of the tension between managerialization of public services and frontline work in the judicial sector.