Israel is the world leader in the number of attorneys per capita, and it is one of the factors leading to overloaded courts and long legal wait times, Justice Yitzhak Amit said in a decision on a High Court of Justice petition on Sunday evening.
Amit said there were multiple factors leading to the well-recognized burden on the court system in response to a petition by a person who had been arrested for drug offenses in March, would be detained until hearings in October or November, and had appealed to be moved up the magistrate court’s schedule. The justice said that other factors included the number of civil cases and judges.
“The amount of civil cases opened in Israel per 100,000 inhabitants is almost twice the average amount of cases opened in European states,” said Amit. “The standard of judges in Israel is only a third of the average number of judges per 100,000 inhabitants in European states.”
Amit said that these factors led to packed schedules for judges, the prolongation of proceedings, and “tortured” those in cases with an endless legal system — especially if they had been ruled detained until the end of the judgment.
Israel has 820 lawyers per 100,000 people
Just over 77,000 attorneys were eligible to vote in the June 20 Israeli Bar Association elections. These practicing lawyers make up 0.82% of the population, or one lawyer for about every 121 people. There are about 820 lawyers per 100,000 people in Israel, and according to the Council of Europe in 2020, European states had an average of 164 lawyers per 100,000 inhabitants.
A voting station for the head of the Israeli Bar Association, at the Magistrate’s Court in Jerusalem, June 20, 2023 (credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)According to a Council of Europe report in 2020 Israel had 739 professional judges, which is almost 8 judges per 100,000 people. On average, European states have 18 judges per 100,000 people, according to the European Union.
In The US-Israel Legal Review 2020, Tadmor Levy & Co’s Yechiel Kasher said that Israel was a “highly litigious country with the highest numbers of lawyers per capita, and an overwhelming number of claims filed each year.” Kasher wrote that 854,000 new claims and appeals were filed in 2018, about one claim per 10 people.
Justice Yosef Elron said in his opinion on Sunday that it was important to conduct criminal proceedings in an efficient manner to avoid heavy loads.
Ultimately, Amit and his fellow justices determined that the High Court shouldn’t interfere in the Beersheba Magistrate Court’s right to set its scheduling, and that filing a petition doesn’t allow a person to skip the line. The justices noted that the lower court had tried to give him the earliest hearing date, and said that it would move him up if an earlier date became available.
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