Selecting the good magistrate: Towards a validated conceptual model of job performance of magistrates.

The modern expectations for accountability of the judicial system are embedded in the movement of judicial performance evaluation that encourages research and practice to map the judicial functioning. Although the accountability of individual magistrates is perceived as a crucial part of assessing the efficiency and efficacy of the justice system, the tension between accountability and independence drove researchers to exclusively focus on the evaluation of the justice system as whole rather than on the quality of the professional functioning of individual magistrates. The quality of one’s professional functioning is often referred to as job performance within selection literature. The definition of job performance endorses three factors: (1) job performance should focus on behaviors rather than on results, (2) only those behaviors that are relevant to the organization’s goals are included, and (3) job performance is a multidimensional construct. Moreover, though the concept of job performance has been extensively studied within other professions, it is never been applied to magistrates. The envisaged research aims at addressing these omissions by (1) conceptualizing the ‘good magistrate’; (2) operationalizing job performance of magistrates accounting for the specificities of the judicial context; (3) empirically validating this operationalization.