Measuring Justice
Quantitative Accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority in South Africa

Explores how performance measurement systems shape South African court and managerial prosecutors' understanding of accountability and their legal work practices.

Johanna Mugler (Author)

9781108475112, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 June 2019

216 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.44 kg

Measuring Justice explores the ways in which South African court and managerial prosecutors deal with the quantification of social phenomena - such as justice, professional work or accountability - and address the radical simplifications of their inherent complexities, misrepresentations and editing as a consequence. While various studies show the concern of professionals about the damaging effects these quantitative forms of accountability have on the creativity, freedom and collaborative nature of expert systems, Mugler shows that the reactions and attitudes of these legal professionals differ substantially. Through careful scrutiny of the everyday work of prosecutors and how they reflect on the relationship between accountability, quantification and law, this book argues that actors who work daily with quantitative accountability measures develop a numerical reflexivity about the process.

1. From apartheid administrators to lawyers of the people: a history of accountability inside the South African Prosecution Authority (1948–2018)
2. Ethnographic research in a multi-local organisation: access, challenges and methods
3. Stats talk' and alternative expressions of accountability: NPA lower court prosecutors at work
4. No fear of numbers: reactivity and the political economy of NPA performance measurement
5. At the top of the NPA: managing with numbers and numerical reflexivity
6. Lies, damned lies and statistics: making sense of misleading or imperfect NPA conviction rates.

Subject Areas: Social law [LNT], Courts & procedure [LNAA], Public international law [LBB], International law [LB], Law & society [LAQ], Law [L]