If justice is consistently delayed, judicial reform is necessary. For a long time, Hong Kong's judicial system has not only maintained social order but also earned international trust. However, when courts suffer from chronic staff shortages and case waiting times often exceed hundreds of days, it becomes more than just an administrative figure within the courts. It becomes a heavy "hidden tax," increasing social costs and internal friction. Local and multinational corporations, imprisoned defendants awaiting trial, and ordinary citizens yearning for justice all share the burden of the courts' stagnation.
The number of cases has continued to increase over the past decade, while the number of judicial personnel remains high.
Over the past decade, court cases have steadily increased and backlogged, while the number of judges and judicial personnel has decreased rather than increased. The staffing vacancy rate remains high at 24.21 TP3T, the negative consequences of which are fully exposed in the waiting times. Taking the criminal case scheduling in the District Court as an example, the target of 100 days was already difficult to achieve ten years ago; a decade later, the problem not only remains unresolved but has worsened. The average waiting time from the first court appearance to the start of trial has skyrocketed from 118 days to 337 days. This is clearly not a temporary fluctuation in staffing cycles, but a structural imbalance between supply and demand.
The century-old tradition of recruiting judges is no longer sustainable. Therefore, we propose to draw on experiences from other places to establish a "professional judge system," allowing law graduates to apply for professional judge positions as a supplementary path to expand manpower.
The existing legal system relies on selecting judges from among seasoned lawyers with many years of private practice. This practice is showing signs of fatigue in today's highly commercialized legal market. Imagine a senior lawyer around 40 years old, at the peak of their career, who, if they were to become a judge, would have to take a 40% to 60% pay cut; in their personal life and social interactions, they would have to be extremely cautious and strictly adhere to the principle of recusal. Asking them to give up the lucrative income of the private market and the social life of their friends is an excessive sacrifice. Faced with such high opportunity costs, passively waiting for industry talents to suddenly realize the importance of this option and sacrifice their own interests is undoubtedly futile.
The current system is struggling, and children from grassroots backgrounds have difficulty realizing their ambitions.
It is precisely because seasoned professionals are unwilling to change course midway that this previously effective system has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Of course, there are certainly many legal practitioners who are committed to justice and unwilling to pursue profit. However, the longer they serve, the heavier the ties become; asking them to abandon their life's work and don the robes of the judiciary is no easy task. Therefore, we can turn our attention to young law graduates. Campuses are never short of young people who study diligently and are full of enthusiasm, whose initial aspiration is not to pursue profits for the wealthy and powerful, but to dedicate themselves to public service. If a clear path to becoming a professional judge is laid out at the starting point of their careers, allowing them to make judging a lifelong profession, just as doctors uphold the Geneva Oath, they too can dedicate their lives to social fairness and justice.
However, the legal profession today suffers from a mismatch in manpower. In the past, Hong Kong only produced a few dozen law students each year; now, with full-time, part-time, and overseas returnees combined, the number of graduates reaches thousands annually. Competition for legal professional certificates is fierce, and the supply of apprenticeship positions in law firms is scarce, causing many promising young people to turn to other careers. Following tradition and becoming a barrister, one faces monthly office rents starting at tens of thousands of dollars, followed by a period of insecure income – a capitalist game that those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds simply cannot afford. This invisible class barrier forces aspiring legal talents to slip away.
Introducing a professional judge system by drawing on the civil law model
There are concerns that young people entering the judicial system too early lack life experience and cannot instill independent thinking in the courts. While the knowledge and experience required for trials can certainly be gleaned from extensive private practice, this is not the only path. The essence of private practice is to maximize the client's interests, or even to be paid by the hour; this is always a parallel path to the independent character and public rationality required of judges. Conversely, if young people start as assistants and undergo decades of judicial training, they will be immersed in drafting judgments, legal reasoning, and case management under the personal supervision of senior judges. Their commitment to social interests and their mastery of trial techniques are in no way inferior to those of commercial lawyers who entered the profession later in life.
Admittedly, professional judges are the traditional talent development model in the civil law system. To worry that adopting their training experience will shake the foundations of common law is to confuse legal dogma with personnel recruitment. We firmly defend the core traditions of the common law system, including case law, the jury system, and the professional division of labor among barristers. As for the training and recruitment mechanism for judges, is it an inviolable golden rule? We emphasize that the initiative's initial intention is to supplement existing channels, to provide a parallel auxiliary tier, and it will not and should not change the tradition of selecting judges from senior practicing lawyers. Candidates entering the training program will still learn the common law principles of precedent, adversarial litigation procedures, and rules of evidence.
Court inefficiency is a weakness; only by improving itself can it achieve long-term success.
Common law systems have never been static; they have a long history of learning from the strengths of civil law systems to improve their own shortcomings. Looking back at Hong Kong's Civil Justice Reform, which began as early as 2000, it underwent a lengthy nine-year review and repeated consultations before the newly revised court rules were implemented in 2009. This massive reform also encountered significant resistance and conservative backlash from within the legal profession. The final implementation boldly incorporated some "inquisitorial" elements from the civil law system, granting common law judges strong case management powers. Today, judges are no longer absolutely passive adjudicators but actively intervene in scheduling and limit expert evidence to reduce costs and delays. Since common law has already flexibly absorbed the strengths of the civil law system in court procedures to address backlogs, our current efforts to expand our judicial staff by drawing on its judge training pathways are simply following this pragmatic historical trend of reform.
The World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index is the most authoritative international benchmark. A closer look at Hong Kong's performance from 2012/13 to the latest 2025 fiscal year reveals that while "Civil Justice" has slightly declined from 0.71 to 0.70, barely maintaining its position, "Criminal Justice" has plummeted from 0.76 to 0.68. Among the many sub-items, the largest drop was in "Timeliness and Effectiveness of the Criminal Trial System." This figure reveals an undeniable reality: the international community considers court efficiency a weakness in Hong Kong's rule of law.
Ten years have passed, and the chronic problems persist. The predicament is stark: waiting times exceeding 300 days, nearly a quarter of judges vacant. How does the legal profession intend to address this? The vitality of any system lies in its adaptability to changing times. Maintaining the core advantages of common law while pragmatically addressing the talent shortage is the fundamental solution. Hong Kong's prosperity over the past century has relied on inclusiveness, not self-imposed limitations. Refusing to seek new paths for a stagnant system will ultimately destroy public trust in the rule of law, perhaps due to arrogance and rigidity. When the inefficiency of the judiciary translates into a tangible, hidden cost hindering urban development, we should abandon our obsession with a single recruitment method. Simply stating "defending tradition" is clearly insufficient to explain the long queues outside the courthouses.
[Hong Kong 01]: https://www.hk01.com/article/60383792?utm_source=01articlecopy&utm_medium=referral
