The Italian judiciary has been under the spotlight for more than two decades. The key criticism addressed to it has been the lack of organizational capacity, which is reflected in the trial time frame. After 2000, European institutions launched a new and comprehensive policy stream, targeting the administrative and organizational capacities of courts and public prosecutor offices. The pivotal policy instrument is represented by standards and soft law in general. By referring to four case studies, analysed in depth on the basis of a qualitative approach, this work engages in a critical appraisal of the New Public Management-inspired judicial policies and the way in which they have been implemented in the judicial sector in Italy.

Points for practitioners

This article makes a point about the structural and institutional conditions that turn out as pivotal factors to ensure an effective and efficient governance by standards. In other terms, the argument deployed herein concerns the function of a regulative agency, which might have the shape and the format of a ministerial unit, where the uniformity and the equality of the services delivered by a public institution or a network of public institutions are the outcome of the implementation of legally binding and non-legally binding norms. This is a key point, then, for public officers serving not only in the judicial sector.