The United States has spent billions of dollars “promoting democracy” across the world. A crucial component of this effort has been “helping establish . . . judicial systems.” A strong judicial system is important for both social and economic reasons. First, strong judiciaries protect against human rights violations such as torture. Second, both independent and efficient judiciaries—two dimensions of judicial performance—have a positive effect on economic performance. For example, a weak judicial system is one reason for Latin America’s economic divergence from East Asia. For these reasons, countries want a strong judiciary. In order to develop a strong judiciary, countries must first analyze their current judicial performance. As a result, research to quantitatively assess judicial performance has emerged. In this report, we evaluate the empirics of this type of research.