Judicial officers give reasons for their decisions. If bare efficiency were the only consideration, disputes could be resolved much more satisfactorily than in the courts. Take the criminal arena. If the only consideration were to punish the guilty and acquit the innocent, as quickly and cheaply as possible, no doubt a bureaucrat could do it, as in some other parts of the world. And providing the resources necessary for that, one may observe, is not limited to financing the courts directly - it includes proper funding outside the courts, such as securing an adequate level of legal aid, presently lacking.
Cost driven exercises, economic rationalism, often ignore the true cost to citizens.
Reducing or maintaining the level of an item of expense in a budget may produce an encouraging financial appearance. In reality, of course, it may often do no more than shift an item from one department s budget to another s. That aside, however, reducing services by not properly funding them may lead to a more intangible, serious cost to society - and for which, interestingly enough, no bureaucrat will likely be held to account. The problem may sometimes be that unless something can be valued in direct financial terms, the temptation is to jettison or ignore it. The cost associated with human anxiety over court delays is a good example.