Reforming Justice

This Brief introduces the Justice Pillars Towards Evidence-Based Reform (JUPITER) initiative, a standardized yet flexible, country-based assessment tool that evaluates the effectiveness of justice systems across countries. Developed by the World Bank's Global Program on Justice and the Rule of Law, JUPITER aims at identifying strengths and weaknesses in key pillars of judicial performance-access, efficiency, and quality. The Brief lays out key advantages of JUPITER's comprehensive approach: its focus on areas with an empirical link to outcomes as investigated in rigorous academic research; its emphasis on the law as well as its application, which enables the identification of potential implementation gaps; its assessment of both the formal and customary justice institutions; and its coverage of the entire country. In so doing, we bring examples from its application in some of the poorest and most fragile countries in the world such as Liberia and South Sudan. This Brief explains the significance of access, efficiency, and quality for the effectiveness of justice delivery and how JUPITER measures performance in each of those areas. It concludes by discussing how the methodology could enable cross-country comparisons as more data is gathered through the JUPITER assessment