1. Introduction

Over the past two decades, judicial systems across many jurisdictions have undergone a marked process of quantitative expansion. One of the most visible dimensions of this trend has been the steady increase in the number of judges relative to population size. This expansion is commonly justified through the language of access to justice, court congestion, and rising litigation rates. The underlying assumption is both intuitive and powerful: more judges should translate into faster proceedings, better protection of rights, and improved overall quality of justice. Yet empirical and experiential evidence increasingly suggests that this assumption may be incomplete, and in some contexts fundamentally misleading. In several countries, rapid growth in judicial personnel has not produced a commensurate improvement in key performance indicators such as the length of proceedings, compliance with the right to a fair trial, public trust in the judiciary, or the effective resolution of disputes. On the contrary, judicial expansion has often coincided with persistent backlogs, recurring violations of the “reasonable time” requirement, and declining confidence in the justice system.

This paradox is particularly salient in the case of Türkiye. Over the last decade, the number of judges has increased at a pace that outstrips population growth and exceeds the rate observed in many comparable jurisdictions. However, this quantitative expansion has not been accompanied by a proportional enhancement in judicial performance or in the perceived legitimacy of the justice system. Despite the growing size of the judiciary, litigation volumes remain high, delays persist, and structural problems related to dispute resolution continue to reproduce themselves.

This article starts from a simple but often overlooked premise: a high number of disputes should not be treated as an indicator of a healthy society, nor should high litigation rates be regarded as a self-evident justification for expanding judicial capacity. On the contrary, persistently elevated levels of litigation may signal deeper dysfunctions in individual-individual, individual-society, and individual-state relations. When courts are systematically required to resolve conflicts that could otherwise be prevented or mitigated through social norms, education, administrative responsibility, or non-judicial mechanisms, the judiciary risks being transformed from a last resort into a routine instrument of social regulation.

Building on this premise, the article advances a critical distinction between two ideal-typical models of justice. The first is the Community-Supported Justice Model, in which social cohesion, ethical norms, effective public administration, and legal minimalism collectively reduce the demand for adjudication. In this model, courts intervene exceptionally, and judicial authority is preserved precisely because it is not overused. The second is what this article conceptualizes as the Occupational Force / Dispute-Driven Justice Model. In this latter configuration, judicial institutions increasingly depend on the persistence and normalization of disputes – criminal, civil, and administrative – as a condition of institutional continuity, professional reproduction, and bureaucratic legitimacy. Originally developed to analyze the dynamics of criminal justice systems, the Occupational Force Model is here extended to encompass the entire justice system, including civil and administrative adjudication. The central claim is not that judges intentionally create disputes, but rather that a judicial system structured around constant dispute absorption may gradually lose its capacity to reduce conflict at the societal level. In such a system, rising litigation rates and expanding judicial staffing become mutually reinforcing phenomena, while underlying social and administrative pathologies remain unaddressed.

Against this background, the article pursues three interrelated objectives. First, it situates the contemporary debate on judge density and access to justice within a broader socio-legal and institutional framework, highlighting the limits of capacity-based approaches that equate justice with adjudicatory volume. Second, it provides a comparative analysis of judge-to-population ratios across selected jurisdictions – namely the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Canada, Japan, China, and Türkiye – using the most recent available data. Third, it evaluates whether increases in judicial capacity correlate with meaningful improvements in judicial performance, focusing on indicators such as the reasonable length of proceedings, rights violations, public trust, and case backlogs.

Methodologically, the article deliberately refrains from treating litigation rates as an independent justification for judicial expansion. Instead, high dispute volumes are interpreted as a variable that itself requires explanation. From this perspective, expanding the judiciary in response to rising litigation risks addressing the symptom rather than the cause, and may inadvertently entrench a system that becomes structurally dependent on dispute inflation.

The article proceeds as follows. Section II develops the theoretical framework, elaborating the contrast between community-supported justice and the occupational force model of adjudication. Section III outlines the methodology, data sources, and comparative approach. Section IV presents the empirical findings on judge density and judicial performance. Section V discusses these findings in light of existing access-to-justice literature and institutional theories. Section VI concludes with policy-oriented reflections, emphasizing dispute prevention, social investment, and the normative repositioning of courts as institutions of last resort rather than permanent instruments of conflict management.

2. Theoretıcal Framework

2.1. Justice Systems Between Capacity and Social Function

Contemporary discussions on judicial reform are predominantly framed through the language of capacity. Concepts such as access to justice, court congestion, judicial efficiency, and case clearance rates dominate both academic and policy-oriented debates (OECD, 2019; World Bank, 2022). Within this paradigm, the justice system is primarily conceived as a service provider, and its effectiveness is measured by its ability to process an increasing volume of disputes within acceptable timeframes. This capacity-centered understanding, while analytically convenient, risks obscuring a more fundamental question: why disputes reach the judiciary in such quantities in the first place. By focusing on throughput rather than on the social and institutional origins of conflict, prevailing frameworks implicitly treat rising litigation as an exogenous and neutral phenomenon. As a result, judicial expansion is often presented as a technical necessity rather than as a choice with normative and structural consequences.

Socio-legal scholarship, however, has long emphasized that courts do not merely respond to social conflicts but also shape the incentives, expectations, and behaviors that generate them (Galanter, 1974; Friedman, 1985). Judicial institutions are embedded within broader social, cultural, and administrative ecosystems, and their quantitative growth cannot be analytically detached from transformations occurring within those systems.

2.2. Disputes as a Structural Variable, Not a Natural Constant

A central assumption challenged in this article is the notion that high litigation rates reflect heightened legal awareness or democratic maturity. While access to legal remedies is undeniably a cornerstone of the rule of law, persistent and systemic dispute inflation may equally indicate deficiencies in social cohesion, administrative accountability, and non-judicial conflict resolution mechanisms (World Justice Project, 2019).

From a sociological perspective, disputes are not natural constants but socially produced phenomena. Their frequency and form depend on factors such as education, cultural norms, trust, institutional design, and the perceived legitimacy of public authority (Ellickson, 1991; Tyler, 2006). When these elements weaken, courts are increasingly called upon to compensate for failures occurring elsewhere in the social order. In this sense, expanding judicial capacity in response to rising litigation may amount to institutionalizing dysfunction rather than resolving it. The judiciary absorbs conflicts that originate in the erosion of social norms, ineffective governance, or regulatory overreach, thereby relieving other institutions of the pressure to reform. Over time, this dynamic risks transforming courts from mechanisms of last resort into default arenas of routine social and administrative interaction.

2.3. The Community-Supported Justice Model

Against this background, the Community-Supported Justice Model represents an ideal-typical framework in which adjudication is embedded within a broader architecture of dispute prevention. In this model, the demand for judicial intervention is structurally constrained by robust social norms, effective public administration, and accessible non-judicial mechanisms of conflict resolution. Key features of this model include:

• the primacy of education, ethical norms, and social trust in shaping behavior;
• administrative responsibility that minimizes unlawful or arbitrary state action;
• widespread use of mediation, negotiation, and informal resolution mechanisms;
• judicial intervention as an ultima ratio, reserved for conflicts that cannot be resolved elsewhere.

Empirical research suggests that societies with higher levels of social trust and institutional legitimacy tend to generate fewer disputes requiring formal adjudication, even when legal rights are well protected (Putnam, 1993; Tyler, 2006). In such contexts, the effectiveness of the judiciary is not measured by its size or output but by its restraint and authority.

2.4. The Occupational Force / Dispute-Driven Justice Model

In contrast, this article conceptualizes the Occupational Force / Dispute-Driven Justice Model to describe a structural configuration in which judicial institutions increasingly rely on the persistence and normalization of disputes for institutional continuity. Under this model, the judiciary expands not merely in response to social need but in a manner that gradually aligns its organizational reproduction with sustained dispute volumes. Originally articulated to analyze dynamics within criminal justice systems, the occupational force logic is not confined to penal adjudication. When extended to civil and administrative law, the model captures a broader institutional pattern: courts become central repositories for conflicts that originate in social fragmentation and administrative malfunction, while alternative resolution mechanisms remain underdeveloped or marginalized.

Importantly, the occupational force model does not presuppose intentional behavior on the part of judges or courts. Rather, it highlights structural incentives embedded within bureaucratic systems. Judicial staffing, budgetary allocations, performance metrics, and career pathways may all become implicitly tied to caseload volumes, creating a self-reinforcing relationship between dispute proliferation and institutional growth. This dynamic resonates with empirical findings indicating that increases in judicial personnel do not necessarily lead to reductions in litigation or delays, particularly where underlying demand-side drivers remain unchanged (OECD, 2019; World Bank, 2022). In such settings, quantitative expansion may stabilize existing inefficiencies rather than eliminate them.

2.5. Extending the Model Across Legal Domains

A key contribution of this article lies in extending the occupational force framework beyond criminal justice to encompass civil and administrative adjudication. While the substantive nature of disputes differs across these domains, the institutional logic governing judicial expansion remains comparable. In civil law, the model manifests through the judicialization of ordinary social and economic interactions, where disputes that could be resolved through negotiation or mediation increasingly culminate in formal litigation. In administrative law, it appears in the normalization of unlawful or procedurally deficient state action, as judicial review substitutes for effective internal accountability. Across all domains, the common denominator is the gradual displacement of non-judicial regulatory and normative mechanisms by adjudication. The justice system becomes a compensatory institution, absorbing conflicts that reflect deficiencies elsewhere, while its own expansion is cited as evidence of responsiveness and reform.

2.6. Conceptual Scope and Limits

The occupational force model does not claim to explain all aspects of judicial behavior or institutional performance. Nor does it deny the importance of access to justice or the necessity of adequate judicial capacity. Its purpose is instead diagnostic: to illuminate the conditions under which judicial expansion ceases to be a solution and becomes part of the problem. By juxtaposing the occupational force model with the community-supported justice model, the article provides a framework for evaluating not only how much justice a system delivers, but what kind of social order that delivery presupposes and reproduces.

4. Methodology

4.1. Research Design and Analytical Strategy

This study adopts a comparative, institutionally grounded research design to examine the relationship between judicial expansion and the functioning of justice systems. Rather than treating adjudicatory capacity as a value-neutral input, the analysis situates judge density within a broader socio-legal framework that emphasizes dispute production, institutional incentives, and performance outcomes. The methodological strategy is intentionally selective. Instead of maximizing the number of indicators, the study prioritizes conceptual clarity and interpretive coherence. This choice reflects the article’s core premise: quantitative judicial expansion must be assessed not by its volume, but by its institutional effects and social consequences. Accordingly, the empirical analysis is organized around three pillars:

• cross-country comparison of judge-to-population ratios using the most recent available data;
• a longitudinal assessment of judicial expansion in Türkiye (2015–2024);
• a limited set of performance indicators capturing delay, rights compliance, public trust, and case accumulation.

4.2. Country Selection and Comparative Scope

The comparative sample includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Canada, Japan, China, and Türkiye. This selection reflects three considerations. First, the sample spans diverse legal traditions and governance structures, allowing for variation in institutional design without reducing the analysis to a binary common law-civil law comparison. Second, the countries selected represent different demographic scales and levels of economic development, making judge density comparisons more informative. Third, Türkiye is treated as the focal case, not as an outlier but as a jurisdiction whose recent trajectory exemplifies broader tensions between judicial expansion and performance.

4.3. Why Litigation Rates Are Excluded

A central methodological decision in this study is the deliberate exclusion of litigation rates (case filings per capita) as an explanatory or justificatory variable. This choice departs from a substantial portion of the access-to-justice literature, which often treats rising caseloads as prima facie evidence of unmet judicial demand (OECD, 2019; World Bank, 2022). The exclusion rests on three interrelated arguments.

First, litigation rates are not exogenous indicators of social need. Dispute volumes are themselves shaped by institutional design, procedural incentives, administrative behavior, and cultural expectations. Treating litigation as an independent variable risks circular reasoning: more cases justify more judges, while more judges normalize the adjudication of ever-expanding categories of conflict.

Second, high litigation rates do not constitute a reliable proxy for social health or legal effectiveness. From a socio-legal perspective, persistent dispute inflation may indicate weakened social norms, deficient public administration, or limited access to non-judicial resolution mechanisms (Galanter, 1974; Ellickson, 1991). Interpreting such inflation as a justification for judicial expansion conflates symptom with cause.

Third, incorporating litigation rates would undermine the theoretical contribution of the article. The occupational force / dispute-driven justice model advanced here treats sustained high dispute volumes as a potential outcome of institutional dependency, not as a neutral demand signal. Including litigation rates as a justificatory input would implicitly endorse the very logic under critique.

For these reasons, litigation volumes are analytically repositioned: they are interpreted as phenomena to be explained, not as parameters that legitimate institutional growth.

4.4. Interpreting the Judge-to-Population Ratio

The primary structural indicator employed in this study is the judge-to-population ratio, expressed as the number of judges per 100,000 inhabitants. This measure is widely used in comparative justice studies and offers two methodological advantages: cross-national comparability and temporal stability (OECD, 2019; World Bank, 2022). However, the indicator is not interpreted as a direct proxy for “access to justice” or judicial quality. Instead, it is treated as a structural variable reflecting institutional scale and orientation. Three interpretive clarifications are essential.

First, a higher judge-to-population ratio does not inherently signify a more effective or fair justice system. Without corresponding improvements in dispute prevention, administrative legality, and procedural discipline, increased judicial staffing may merely absorb existing inefficiencies.

Second, rapid growth in judge density – particularly when outpacing population growth – signals a shift in institutional reliance. It suggests that courts are increasingly tasked with managing conflicts that originate outside the judiciary, in social relations or administrative practice.

Third, judge density must be assessed relationally, not normatively. The analysis therefore avoids defining an “optimal” number of judges. Instead, it examines whether changes in judicial capacity correlate with improvements in system-level outcomes such as reasonable duration of proceedings, rights compliance, public confidence, and backlog reduction.

In this framework, the judge-to-population ratio functions as a diagnostic indicator: it reveals the degree to which a justice system has expanded its adjudicatory apparatus in response to persistent dispute pressure.

4.5. Performance Indicators and Outcome Measures

To evaluate the institutional consequences of judicial expansion, the study relies on a limited but conceptually focused set of performance indicators. These include:

• measures related to the reasonable length of proceedings and systemic delay;
• data on rights violations associated with judicial inefficiency;
• indicators of public trust and confidence in the justice system;
• measures of case accumulation and backlog.

The selection reflects a normative orientation: a justice system that expands without improving these outcomes cannot plausibly claim success based on capacity alone.

4.6. Methodological Implications

By excluding litigation rates and reframing judge density as a structural rather than normative indicator, the methodology aligns with the article’s broader theoretical claims. It resists equating justice with adjudicatory volume and instead foregrounds the relationship between institutional design and social order. This approach allows the subsequent analysis to address a core question: whether judicial expansion functions as a remedy for systemic dysfunction, or as a mechanism that stabilizes and reproduces it.

5. Findings

This section presents the empirical findings of the study in three stages. First, it situates Türkiye within a comparative cross-country landscape using the most recent available data on judicial staffing and population. Second, it analyzes the evolution of the number of judges in Türkiye between 2015 and 2024, combining judge counts with population dynamics. Third, it examines whether quantitative judicial expansion corresponds to observable improvements in selected justice-system performance indicators.

The objective of this section is not to establish a strict causal relationship, but to assess whether the scale, direction, and persistence of judicial expansion align with improvements in access to justice, fairness, and institutional performance.

5.1. Cross-Country Comparison: Judge Density and Structural Positioning

Table 1. Judges and Population – Selected Countries (Approximate 2022-2024)

Table 1 presents the most recent available data on the number of judges and total population for the selected countries, together with the resulting judge-to-population ratios. Rather than ranking jurisdictions in normative terms, the table is intended to situate Türkiye within a comparative structural landscape.

Two general observations emerge from this comparison. First, there is substantial cross-country variation in judge density among countries with comparable population sizes and levels of economic development. This variation cannot be plausibly explained by population alone, nor by abstract references to “legal culture”. Countries with relatively stable or declining litigation volumes may exhibit lower judge-to-population ratios without experiencing systemic breakdown, while others maintain larger judiciaries despite persistent performance challenges.

Second, Türkiye occupies a distinct position characterized not only by its absolute judge density but by the trajectory of its judicial expansion. While several comparator countries display long-term stability in judge-to-population ratios – suggesting incremental and demand-sensitive adjustments-Türkiye’s recent experience is marked by a pronounced upward shift. This shift places Türkiye closer to high-density jurisdictions despite the absence of corresponding improvements in core performance indicators.

Crucially, the comparative data do not support the assumption that higher judge density reliably correlates with superior judicial outcomes. If anything, the comparison underscores the need to move beyond static cross-sectional rankings and to examine dynamic patterns of expansion and their institutional consequences.

5.2. Türkiye (2015–2024): Judicial Expansion and Population Dynamics

The longitudinal data for Türkiye between 2015 and 2024 reveal a consistent and significant increase in the total number of judges. When combined with official population figures for the same period, the data present the following year-by-year picture:

• 2015: ~78.2 million population, 10,382 judges, ≈133 judges per million
• 2016: ~79.3 million population, 11,372 judges, ≈143 judges per million
• 2017: ~80.3 million population, 11,530 judges, ≈144 judges per million
• 2018: ~81.4 million population, 13,794 judges, ≈169 judges per million
• 2019: ~82.6 million population, 14,391 judges, ≈174 judges per million
• 2020: ~83.4 million population, 15,151 judges, ≈182 judges per million
• 2021: ~84.1 million population, 15,614 judges, ≈186 judges per million
• 2022: ~85.0 million population, 15,710 judges, ≈185 judges per million
• 2023: ~85.3 million population, 16,406 judges, ≈192 judges per million
• 2024: ~85.7 million population, 17,061 judges, ≈199 judges per million

(Judges: Republic of Türkiye, Ministry of Justice, Justice Statistics, 2024; Population: TÜİK ADNKS / World Bank population series; Ratios calculated by the author)

When disaggregated year by year, this combined dataset displays two notable features. First, the annual rate of judicial growth is not parallel to population growth. Over the period examined, Türkiye’s population increased by approximately 10 percent, while the number of judges increased by more than 65 percent. As a result, the number of judges per million population rose from approximately 133 to nearly 200, indicating a pronounced shift in judicial density. Second, the pattern of increase is structurally cumulative rather than corrective. Judicial staffing grows persistently across the decade, without evidence of stabilization following periods of backlog reduction or temporary workload shocks. This suggests an institutionalized reliance on capacity expansion as a default policy response rather than episodic adjustment tied to demographic or short-term demand factors.

This finding is methodologically significant. If judicial density were primarily a function of population growth or transient service demand, one would expect convergence or periodic adjustment between population and judicial staffing curves. The sustained divergence instead points to a deeper structural orientation in which adjudication increasingly absorbs conflicts that originate outside the judiciary. Importantly, this observation does not imply that the increase in judges was unwarranted in absolute terms. Rather, it raises a narrower but critical question: what problems this expansion was intended to solve, and whether it succeeded in doing so in terms of access to justice, reasonable time of proceedings, and institutional performance.

5.3. Judicial Expansion and Performance: The Performance Panel

To assess the institutional consequences of judicial expansion, the analysis turns to a limited set of performance indicators capturing the reasonable length of proceedings, compliance with procedural rights, public confidence in the judiciary, and indicators of case accumulation. These indicators do not purport to measure “justice” in a normative or philosophical sense. Rather, they are used to evaluate whether a substantial and sustained increase in judicial capacity – rising from approximately 133 to nearly 199 judges per million population between 2015 and 2024 – translated into observable institutional improvements.

Across the indicators examined, three cautious but consistent patterns emerge. First, persistent problems relating to the reasonable length of proceedings remain visible despite the marked expansion in judicial staffing. While year-to-year fluctuations can be observed, there is no sustained downward trend that would indicate a structural resolution of delay-related issues. This is particularly noteworthy given the scale of expansion: over the same decade in which judge density increased by nearly 50 percent, delays remained a recurring feature of judicial practice. This pattern aligns with comparative research showing that capacity increases alone rarely eliminate systemic delay when demand-side drivers – such as dispute generation, procedural complexity, or administrative legality deficits – remain unchanged (OECD, 2019; World Bank, 2022).

Second, rights-related performance indicators do not display a proportional improvement commensurate with the rise in judge density. Findings concerning procedural violations linked to delay or inefficiency – where available – suggest that increased staffing primarily stabilizes existing workloads rather than transforming institutional functioning. In this sense, judicial expansion appears to operate as a compensatory mechanism, absorbing pressure rather than altering the structural conditions that give rise to rights-related deficiencies.

Third, indicators of public trust and confidence in the judiciary do not exhibit a consistent positive correlation with increased judge density. From a socio-legal perspective, this finding is significant. If the expansion of judicial capacity were widely perceived as enhancing fairness, accessibility, or procedural justice, one would expect a corresponding increase in institutional legitimacy (Tyler, 2006). The available data do not support such an inference. Instead, legitimacy appears to be shaped by factors that extend beyond numerical capacity, including predictability, consistency, and the perceived necessity of litigation itself.

Taken together, these observations point to a central empirical insight: quantitative judicial expansion functions primarily as a buffering mechanism, enabling the system to absorb rising volumes of disputes without fundamentally altering the conditions that generate them.

5.4. Interpreting the Findings: Expansion Without Transformation

The empirical patterns observed across the cross-country comparison, the Türkiye time series, and the performance panel converge on a common theme. Judicial expansion, even when substantial and sustained, does not automatically produce qualitative improvements in justice delivery. This conclusion should not be misconstrued as suggesting that judicial capacity is irrelevant, nor that under-resourced courts can perform effectively. Rather, the findings indicate that capacity expansion in isolation is insufficient. Where courts are structurally positioned to compensate for deficits in social cohesion, administrative legality, regulatory effectiveness, or non-judicial dispute resolution mechanisms, additional judges may prevent systemic overload without enabling systemic improvement.

From the perspective developed in the theoretical framework, these results are consistent with the Occupational Force / Dispute-Driven Justice Model. Under this model, judicial growth stabilizes a system characterized by sustained dispute production across civil, administrative, and criminal domains, but does not reduce the underlying demand for adjudication. The judiciary increasingly functions as an occupational force managing social conflict, rather than as an institution embedded within a broader ecosystem of dispute prevention and resolution.

5.5. Cautionary Notes

Two caveats are warranted. First, the findings should not be interpreted as establishing a causal relationship between higher judge density and poor judicial performance. The analysis is descriptive and interpretive rather than econometric. Its contribution lies in identifying structural misalignments between expansion and outcomes, not in attributing institutional failure to judicial staffing levels per se. Second, judicial expansion may well have prevented further deterioration in performance. The absence of measurable improvement does not imply the absence of effect. However, this primarily defensive role reinforces the central claim of the article: a justice system that must continuously expand merely to avoid decline may already be operating beyond its sustainable social function.

6. Discussion

6.1. From Capacity Expansion to Structural Dependence

The findings presented in the previous section invite a broader interpretive discussion concerning the role assigned to courts within contemporary governance structures. In Türkiye, the sustained and rapid expansion of judicial personnel – culminating in a rise from approximately 133 to nearly 199 judges per million population within a decade – cannot be explained solely by population growth or temporary workload pressures. Rather, it reflects a deeper structural dependence on adjudication as a primary mechanism for managing social, economic, and administrative conflict.

This dependence manifests across all branches of the justice system. In civil law, courts increasingly absorb disputes stemming from contractual instability, weak consumer protection, and inconsistent regulatory enforcement. In administrative law, litigation operates as a corrective substitute for deficiencies in legality, transparency, and internal administrative accountability. In criminal law, courts are tasked not only with sanctioning wrongdoing but also with compensating for broader failures in social policy, prevention strategies, and public trust.

Seen in this light, judicial expansion appears less as a proactive strategy to improve justice delivery and more as a systemic adaptation to chronic dispute production. Courts expand in order to prevent institutional overload, yet this expansion does not meaningfully alter the upstream conditions that continuously regenerate judicial demand.

6.2. Extending the Occupational Force Model Beyond Criminal Justice

The Occupational Force Model was initially developed to describe a criminal justice system operating under sustained pressure to process high volumes of cases, where institutional actors become structurally oriented toward throughput and case management rather than conflict reduction. The present findings indicate that this model can – and should – be extended to the justice system as a whole.

In its generalized form, the model describes a Dispute-Driven Justice System characterized by three interrelated features. First, judicial capacity expansion becomes the default policy response. Rising dispute volumes are primarily addressed by increasing the number of judges, rather than by intervening in the upstream conditions that generate disputes. Second, judicial institutions become functionally dependent on dispute inflows. While individual judges do not actively “seek” disputes, the system as a whole stabilizes around a steady or growing volume of litigation. Over time, adjudication becomes normalized as a central mode of social regulation rather than an exceptional intervention. Third, performance improvements plateau despite numerical growth. As demonstrated in the findings, additional judges may prevent deterioration but do not reliably improve timeliness, public trust, or rights compliance. The system thus operates in a condition of managed saturation, not transformation.

Under this generalized Occupational Force / Dispute-Driven framework, judicial growth functions primarily as a buffering mechanism, absorbing conflicts originating in markets, administrations, and social relations without reducing their incidence.

6.3. Litigation Volume as a Symptom, Not a Justification

A common counter-argument to concerns about judicial expansion holds that high litigation rates necessitate increased judicial staffing. This view treats dispute volume as an exogenous fact and judicial capacity as a neutral response. The analysis in this article challenges that assumption. High litigation rates may signal pathological rather than healthy social dynamics. Persistent disputes between individuals, between individuals and the state, and between individuals and institutions often reflect deficiencies in legal certainty, administrative legality, regulatory effectiveness, or social trust. In such contexts, courts become default venues for conflicts that could – and arguably should – be resolved earlier or elsewhere. Accordingly, litigation volume should be understood as a diagnostic indicator, not as a normative benchmark. Using high dispute rates to justify continuous judicial expansion risks entrenching a system in which adjudication substitutes for prevention, education, and governance quality.

6.4. Why More Judges Do Not Necessarily Mean Better Justice

The absence of a proportional relationship between judicial expansion and performance outcomes becomes less paradoxical once the structural role of courts is reconsidered. Where judicial systems are expected to compensate for upstream failures, additional judges may merely stabilize existing inefficiencies. This dynamic helps explain why improvements in core indicators – such as the reasonable length of proceedings, public confidence, and procedural compliance – remain limited despite substantial increases in judicial staffing. Courts operating under chronic inflow pressure may process more cases without fundamentally improving the quality or perceived legitimacy of justice delivery. From a socio-legal perspective, institutional legitimacy depends not only on access and speed, but also on the perception that disputes are exceptional rather than endemic. A justice system that must continuously expand to manage ordinary social interactions risks normalizing conflict rather than resolving it.

6.5. Dispute-Driven Justice versus Community-Supported Justice

The generalized Occupational Force Model stands in contrast to what may be described as a Community-Supported Justice System. In such a system, courts retain a central but bounded role, intervening primarily when other mechanisms fail. Community-supported justice emphasizes:

• dispute prevention through legal clarity and administrative legality,
• social trust and legal consciousness,
• education, mediation, and non-judicial resolution mechanisms, and
• the expectation that most social interactions should not culminate in litigation.

Under this model, judicial capacity is calibrated conservatively and expanded only when structural reforms fail to contain dispute generation. Courts remain authoritative and accessible, but they are not expected to compensate for systemic deficits elsewhere.

6.6. Limits of the Discussion

Two limitations should be acknowledged. First, the analysis does not claim that judicial expansion causes poor performance, nor that reducing judicial capacity would improve justice outcomes. The argument is structural and interpretive, not causal. Second, judicial expansion may have prevented more severe deterioration in justice delivery. However, this defensive function reinforces rather than undermines the central claim: a system that relies on continuous expansion to avoid collapse may already be operating beyond its sustainable social role.

7. Policy Implications and Recommendations

7.1. Reframing the Policy Question: From “How Many Judges?” to “Why So Many Disputes?”

The findings suggest that the central policy challenge is not the absolute number of judges, but the structural conditions that continuously generate disputes requiring adjudication. Policy debates narrowly focused on judicial staffing risk misdiagnosing the problem. A justice system that expands primarily to absorb rising dispute volumes may preserve short-term functionality, but it does so at the cost of long-term institutional balance. Sustainable reform therefore requires shifting policy attention upstream – from adjudicatory capacity to dispute prevention, governance quality, and social trust.

7.2. Prioritizing Dispute Prevention over Dispute Absorption

Litigation should be treated as an exception rather than a baseline mode of social regulation. Where courts routinely manage conflicts that could be prevented or resolved earlier, judicial expansion becomes compensatory rather than transformative. Policy priorities should include:

• strengthening legal certainty in private law through clearer substantive rules and predictable enforcement,
• improving administrative legality, transparency, and internal review mechanisms to reduce citizen–state litigation,
• reinforcing regulatory compliance to prevent disputes from escalating into formal adjudication.

These measures aim to reduce dispute inflows not by restricting access to justice, but by improving the quality of primary governance.

7.3. Investing in Non-Judicial Resolution Mechanisms

Mediation, conciliation, arbitration, and administrative complaint mechanisms should be treated as core components of justice policy, not auxiliary tools. Effective non-judicial mechanisms resolve disputes earlier, preserve relationships, reduce adversarial escalation, and allow courts to focus on conflicts that genuinely require authoritative adjudication. Their legitimacy depends on accessibility, fairness, and enforceability – not on procedural complexity or judicialization.

7.4. Judicial Capacity as a Strategic, Not Automatic, Variable

Judicial expansion should not function as an automatic response to workload pressures. Instead, staffing decisions should be strategically linked to demonstrable changes in dispute-generating conditions. This implies:

• linking judicial staffing to upstream institutional reforms,
• avoiding permanent capacity increases in response to temporary shocks,
• periodically reassessing whether additional judges address causes or merely symptoms.

Such an approach protects judicial independence by preventing courts from being positioned as the primary managers of systemic social conflict.

7.5. Rebalancing the Justice System’s Social Function

Courts are essential for rights protection and conflict resolution, but they are not designed to serve as universal problem-solvers. A justice system expected to process ever-growing volumes of disputes risks normalizing litigation as an ordinary feature of social life. A Community-Supported Justice System instead preserves courts as authoritative, credible, and accessible institutions – strong not because they are numerous, but because they are needed less often and trusted more deeply.

8. Conclusion

This article has examined a question that is frequently assumed rather than critically interrogated: whether expanding the number of judges constitutes a reliable, sustainable, and normatively sound pathway to better justice outcomes. By situating Türkiye within a comparative and longitudinal framework, and by deliberately decoupling judicial capacity from litigation volume as a justificatory metric, the analysis has sought to reorient the discussion away from numerical adequacy and toward institutional meaning.

At the empirical level, the findings demonstrate that Türkiye has experienced a sustained and structurally distinctive increase in judicial staffing over the past decade. This expansion has occurred at a pace that significantly exceeds population growth and diverges from the relatively stable trajectories observed in many comparable jurisdictions. Crucially, this quantitative growth has not been accompanied by proportional or consistent improvements in core performance indicators, including the reasonable length of proceedings, public confidence in the judiciary, or systemic congestion. While judicial expansion may have played a defensive role in preventing further deterioration, the available evidence does not support the claim that it has produced transformative improvements in justice delivery.

These patterns call into question a deeply entrenched assumption in justice policy: that more judges, by themselves, generate better justice. They also challenge the widespread tendency to treat high dispute or litigation rates as neutral, inevitable, or even healthy indicators of legal demand. Persistent and elevated dispute volumes may instead reflect structural pathologies – deficits in legal certainty, administrative legality, regulatory effectiveness, social trust, or conflict-resolution culture. In such contexts, courts risk becoming compensatory institutions, absorbing conflicts generated elsewhere rather than resolving them at their source.

To conceptualize this dynamic, the article has extended the Occupational Force / Dispute-Driven Justice Model beyond its original application in criminal justice to encompass civil and administrative adjudication. In its generalized form, the model captures a justice system structurally oriented toward managing chronic dispute production. Judicial expansion under this model functions as a stabilizing buffer: it mitigates overload and preserves operational continuity, yet it does not reduce the underlying demand for adjudication. Over time, this configuration risks normalizing litigation as an ordinary mode of social regulation and repositioning courts as primary managers of systemic conflict rather than as exceptional arbiters of last resort.

This diagnosis raises a deeper philosophical and institutional concern. Courts derive their authority not merely from accessibility or capacity, but from their exceptional role within a broader normative order. Adjudication is institutionally meaningful precisely because it is not the default mechanism for governing social life. A justice system in which ordinary social, economic, and administrative interactions routinely culminate in litigation risks eroding the symbolic and normative distinctiveness of judicial authority. When adjudication becomes ubiquitous, its capacity to command legitimacy, finality, and trust may be weakened rather than strengthened.

Contrasted with the Dispute-Driven model is the idea of a Community-Supported Justice System, in which courts retain a central but bounded role. In such a system, adjudication intervenes authoritatively when necessary, but primary responsibility for conflict prevention and management rests with social cohesion, legal clarity, administrative legality, regulatory enforcement, education, and non-judicial resolution mechanisms. Judicial capacity in this framework is calibrated conservatively and strategically, expanding only when upstream reforms fail to contain dispute generation. Courts remain strong not because they are omnipresent, but because they are reserved, authoritative, and trusted.

The implications of this analysis are not anti-judicial, nor do they suggest that reducing the number of judges would automatically improve justice outcomes. Adequately resourced courts are indispensable to the rule of law, and chronic under-capacity can be as damaging as unchecked expansion. The argument advanced here is more demanding and more institutionally oriented: judicial capacity should not function as a substitute for upstream governance failures, nor should it be treated as a proxy for justice quality.

For Türkiye, the findings suggest that further increases in judicial staffing are unlikely, on their own, to deliver meaningful improvements in timeliness, trust, or rights protection. Sustainable reform will require coordinated investments beyond the judiciary – particularly in education, administrative legality, regulatory compliance, dispute prevention, and legal culture. These investments do not aim to restrict access to courts, but to ensure that recourse to adjudication reflects genuine necessity rather than systemic default.

More broadly, this study contributes to comparative justice scholarship by emphasizing dynamic trajectories over static ratios, and by foregrounding the social and institutional conditions under which judicial expansion occurs. It invites future research to explore the interaction between dispute generation, institutional design, and judicial capacity through mixed methods, sub-national analysis, and longer time horizons. 

Ultimately, the legitimacy and sustainability of a justice system do not depend on how many judges it employs, but on how often society must turn to judges at all. A system that must grow indefinitely to manage conflict may remain operational, yet it risks drifting away from its foundational purpose. Reorienting justice policy toward dispute reduction, institutional balance, and social trust offers a more durable vision – one in which courts remain strong not because they are numerous, but because they are exceptional, authoritative, and deeply trusted.

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© 2026 Prof. Dr. Vahit Bıçak / Bıçak Law Firm – All rights reserved. This article was written by Prof. Dr. Vahit Bıçak for publication on the website www.bicakhukuk.com. Even if cited as a source, the full text of the article may not be used without prior permission. However, a portion of the article may be quoted, provided that an active link is included. Publishing the article in whole or in part without indicating the author and the source constitutes a violation of personal and intellectual property rights.

Reference: Bıçak Vahit (2026) “Rethinking Judicial Capacity: Why Expanding the Number of Judges Fails to Deliver Better Justice Outcomes”, Bıçak Law Firm Blog, https://www.bicakhukuk.com/en/more-judges-do-not-mean-better-justice/, Prgf. __., Access Date: ….