A BEHAVIOR-BASED EVALUATION INSTRUMENT FOR JUDGES

The belief that judicial performance should be evaluated has gained in creasing momentum. A number of states have used surveys of attorneys a s a primary source of information about judicial performance. The eval uation survey, if not carefully constructed may lead to biased evaluat ions. This research reports on an effort to create a survey that would be easily administered while at the same time providing information f ree from bias. Using a procedure developed in other occupational field s, the researchers developed an instrument that uses ''critical incide nts'' of actual judicial behavior as benchmarks for scales to measure judicial performance across str dimensions. Each of the six dimensions consists of five items. The instrument was field tested and shown to be free from bias (i.e., Halo/Horn and leniency effects) often found i n evaluation instruments.