Procedural speed is a pillar of any justice system, but it may not be the only one. The time of Justice must serve the fair decision. Justice cannot be transformed into a factory of lame and short-sighted sentences. Justice decides the fate of people and companies. It is a center of consideration, listening and reason. When the clock becomes a condition of the judge’s role, alarms must ring.
This reversal of priorities – subtle, progressive and most of the time well-intentioned – is one of the most serious risks facing the democratic Rule of Law today. The dominant discourse of procedural efficiency, with its indicators, goals and rankings of performance, he installed himself in the corridors of the administration of Justice with the ease of someone bringing good news. But there is a question that this discourse often forgets: efficient for what? And for whom?
The Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, in its article 20, simultaneously enshrines the right to a decision within a reasonable time and the right to effective judicial protection. They are not alternative values, they are complementary. And none of them can be sacrificed in the name of the other without the Judiciary losing its reason for being.
Fast is not synonymous with fair. A decision made without sufficient contradiction, without time for each party to explain and substantiate their position, can be statistically quick and, at the same time, materially unfair. Worse: it may be null. Haste in Justice is not a virtue. It is a risk disguised as modernity.
The quantitative management model of Justice – where performance is measured by the number of cases closed and not by the quality of decisions rendered – brings the judicial exercise dangerously close to a business logic that is structurally foreign to it. Magistrates are not office managers. The courtroom is not a factory assembly line. And judicial independence – an essential citizen guarantee, not a corporate privilege – does not survive intact under the pressure of goals that ignore the complexity of each specific case. Statistics are a useful diagnostic tool, but they become pernicious when they become the sole purpose of the system.
Procedural time is, in essence, the legitimate space for reflection, contradiction and legal argumentation. A process is not just a set of formal rituals or a sequence of procedural acts: it is the means by which society rediscovers the balance between reason and equity, between written law and the justice of the case. To take away from the process the time it needs is to amputate what is most essential, that is, the possibility of being truly fair. A good judge decides thoughtfully, without pressure, without haste that encourages error and bad decisions. Late justice is itself a form of injustice and there can be no possible mistake.
What is proposed is a distinction that the public debate has systematically ignored: the difference between responsible speed and speed as an end in itself. The first is achievable through better judicial organization, intelligent digitalization of processes, adequate procedural filters and careful management of available resources. The second compresses the contradiction, weakens the reasoning and produces decisions that arrive early, but decide poorly and create more injustice. The reasonable decision time is the one that guarantees a fair decision, not the one that satisfies statistical and ranking indicators of the fastest.
Justice is a right with its own clock. It must be punctual, but never rushed. Because what citizens and businesses expect from the court is not just a decision, but an impartial entity that listens to their reasons and makes a decision that respects them, even if it may be unfavorable to them. And this decision, when it is fair and competent, must have the time it deserves to be handed down.
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