Introduction

Elements of New Public Management have also made their entrance in the legal professional world. The Dutch judicial organization has been reorganized in order to improve its transparency and efficiency, backed by the budgetary incentives employed by a supervisory board of adjudication (the so-called Raad voor de rechtspraak) and the Ministry of Justice (e.g. Mak 2008a, 2008b). This fits with a changed legal culture: the judiciary is confronted with a critical general public that no longer takes its authority and traditional institutions for granted. Those who seek justice claim a right to transparent and efficient adjudication and so does the Dutch taxpayer who demands value for money. Sometimes Dutch taxpayers behave like angry customers at an airline service counter. After ordering the criminal prosecution of the popular politician Geert Wilders for insulting Islamic minorities, the enlisted judges of the Amsterdam court of appeals were (anonymously) threatened to such a serious degree that the president of the court decided to publicly sound the alarm over our legal order.

Although adjudication is a public service, legal officials are not directly at the service of the personal interests and political preferences of citizens. Many feel however that if judges are not at their service, they must be on the side of their political enemies. It goes without saying that in such a climate judges face the considerable challenge of explaining their role and responsibility as independent servants of the law in concrete and accessible terms. In such a climate the struggle for transparency and efficiency of adjudication is essential.

The role and standing of public prosecutors has also changed in recent years. Several commentators in the Netherlands have noted a trend towards a more adversarial (American) type of criminal procedure, partly due to a changing mentality in the public attorney's office. Social order and public safety have been high on the priority list of almost all democratic parties. From a wise public-spirited ‘magistrate’, committed to social harmony and justice, prosecutors are said to have transformed into assertive ‘crime fighters’ who see their role mainly as instrumental to the protection of social order and public safety by the reduction of the incidence of crime.