Number-crunching the courts: it's time to bring data-driven oversight to the nation's halls of justice.

• Author: Beato, Greg

HOW MANY U.S. citizens end up pleading guilty in a courtroom each year without ever getting access to an attorney? In which counties are pre-trial detainees least likely to obtain release through bail? Even know-it-all leaker Edward Snowden may not have the answers to these questions.

As federal operatives eye-grope our metadata and local law enforcement agencies increasingly establish "reasonable suspicion" based on computer algorithms that predict where crimes might happen, our constitutional protections regarding the right to counsel and due process grow even more important.

And yet how effectively can we assess the strength of these protections if we have little or no information on which to base our assessments? If you want to know how the latest Shafer Vineyards cabernet compares within the larger universe of California reds, Wine Spectator is there to give you an authoritative, easy-to-comprehend ranking. If you want to determine which Ivy League school has the best faculty/student ratio, U.S. News & World Report makes that easy.

A similar resource for our court system doesn't exist. "There is no way to compare how counties are performing basic legal services all across America," the journalist and attorney Amy Bach writes in an email. "While [some] organizations attempt to monitor courts, they do so in isolation for intra-court use only."

Bach hopes to change that. Three years ago, after writing Ordinary Injustice, a calmly reported polemic of how expedience, lax adversarialism, and other institutional lapses are systematically eroding the quality of American courts, Bach founded a nonprofit called Measures for Justice. Its mandate: to develop a Justice Index, a standardized set of measures that will make it easier to assess how well courts are performing, both on an individual basis and in relation to their peers.

Many organizations, including the American Bar Association, issue guidelines designed to help courts operate in a fair and accessible manner. And courts do compile substantial information about themselves, some of which they publicize. For example, the National Center for State Courts, an independent, nonprofit court improvement organization, has developed a set of performance measures called CourTools. They include what a given court's cost per case is, what percentage of the people it summons for jury duty end up serving, and similar measurements. But only a handful of states use CourTools to disseminate information...