The U.S. Has Few Judges (Recap Post)

The United States has about fifty lawyers for every judge (1,400,000 lawyers and about 28,000 judges including magistrates and federal administrative law judges), while Europe has about one and a half lawyers for every judge (somewhat more than a million lawyer and about 700,000 judges), using a broad definition of lawyer that includes, for example, legally trained notaries. 

If you consider U.S. jurors and European "lay judges" (on a full time equivalent basis), then in the U.S., you have about twenty-five lawyers for every FTE judge or juror, while Europe has perhaps one lawyer per judge.

The U.S. also has proportionately far fewer appellate court judges relative to the share of its judges that preside in trial courts, than in Europe.

The small number of judges also applies on a per capita basis. The U.S. has a population of 333 million, giving it one judge per 11,893 people (excluding jurors), while Europe has a population of 448 million, giving it one judge per 640 people (excluding U.K. jurors and lay judges), meaning that the U.S. has more than 18 times fewer judges per capita.

The combined number of lawyers and judges in the U.S. per capita is about 233 per thousand people. The combined number of lawyers and judges in Europe per capita is about 249 per thousand people. So, the overall personnel demands of the legal systems in the U.S. and Europe are similar, but the U.S. system has a much higher proportion of private lawyers, while Europe has a much higher proportion of judges.

Legal systems elsewhere in the world are mostly civil law systems rather than common law systems (e.g. Latin America, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and much of Africa) that are structurally much more similar to Europe than to the U.S.

(First blogged on September 7, 2012, with mild reanalysis and summarization in  this post.)