Revista da EMERJ - V. 21 - N. 2 - Maio/Agosto - 2019

25  R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 21, n. 2, p. 11-39, Maio-Agosto, 2019  After reading Di Federico’s statement, it is worth asking: (a) whether the current poor performance of the Italian civil justice is really due, in a significant way, to the lack of substantial control over the professional performance and diligence of Italian magistrates; 63 (b) whether the real causes of the excessive duration of civil proceedings in Italy have finally been discovered; (c) whether the strong protection of judicial independence in Italy has played a major role in causing the inefficiency of the judicial system. b) Empirical Assessment: The use of Indicators It has become a commonplace that the Italian system of civil justice is inefficient, because of the huge backlog of cases and the delay of ordi- nary civil proceedings. 64 To assess the current state of affairs in Italy one has to use some indicators concerning the flow of proceedings, clearance rates, disposition time, number of judges, number of lawyers, litigation rate, and so on. One should be well aware that using indicators (ingeneral and, inparticular, ina comparative perspective) is somewhat a risky business, as the researcher (especially the scholar in civil procedure working, so to speak, in a stand- alone position) has no control over its methodological premises. However, one has somehow to step in, as the use of indicators for evaluating and comparing the performance of national judicial systems in a crosscountry perspective has spread at a remarkable pace since the beginning of the XXIst century and is becoming a powerful tool of global and European governance. 65 c) The EU Justice Scoreboard As an example of this approach, consider the EU Justice Score- 63 Cf. also S. Chiarloni , Civil Justice and its Paradoxes: An Italian Perspective, p. 277: “The fact that judges are civil ser- vants employed by the State had given rise in the past to certain problems typical of a bureaucracy lacking a tradition of excellence and hard work”. 64 For the Italian reader: “ordinary proceedings” refers to all proceedings encompassing a cognizione piena , a plenary asses- sment on the issues of fact and law of the dispute. 65 For further remarks on this point, s. R. Caponi , Doing business come scopo del processo civile?, Foro Italiano, 2015, V, c. 10 ff.; K.E. Davis, A. Fisher, B. Kingsbury, S.E. Merry , Governance by Indicators. Global Power through Quantification and Rankings, Oxford, OUP, 2012; S.E. Merry, The Quiet Power of Indicators. Measuring Development Corruption and the Rule of Law, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015; R. Rottenburg , The World of Indicators. The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015.