Time Standards for Justice

Abstract

The machinery of justice is under great pressures both popular and professional to expedite justice. While the attainment of expeditious justice is a generally accepted goal, the meaning of expeditious justice is unsettled and ambiguous. The struggle for expediting justice may have a limited significance if the goal is expressed in ambiguous and general terms. Hence it is important to go beyond the words, to establish standards for expeditious justice and as far as practicable, to express them in numerical terms. The purpose of this paper is to examine the possible reference points for measuring court delay and to discuss the numerical standards of expeditious justice