“The Judicial Conference of Australia (JCA) endorses the response of the Chief Justice of the Federal Court to the article by Aaron Patrick in the Australian Financial Review on 26 October 2018, the President of the JCA, Justice Judith Kelly said today.
“As that response accurately and succinctly points out, the analysis in the Patrick article is fundamentally flawed,” she said. “The “statistics” cited fail to account for, among other things:
Justice Kelly said that, as the Federal Court had pointed out in its response, the Court’s work is not homogeneous and of a repetitive character. It conducts a wide variety of work, including in areas of significant specialisation.
“It is neither meaningful nor helpful to compare the work of individual judges, and to purport to judge their productivity, by such simplistic methods of analysis as average number or words or paragraphs per day without taking any account of these qualitative and quantitative factors,” Justice Kelly said.
The Judicial Conference of Australia is the professional association of judges and magistrates in Australia.
For further information, contact the Judicial Conference of Australia Secretariat.