The judiciary of Bosnia and Herzegovina is in crisis. Despite extensive reforms and oversight from the international community since the war in the Balkans, it has been rocked recently by scandals ranging from politicization of the courts to outright corruption. The problems may well stem from there being too much, rather than too little, judicial independence. It presents a powerful example for the United States Supreme Court, which is experiencing an ethics crisis of its own. If we hope to hold the American judiciary up as an example to other countries struggling to establish the Rule of Law, no less preserve our democracy, we need to find solutions within our own system of checks and balances. The Supreme Court needs to own up to its responsibility to foster public confidence in the courts.

Just over 20 years ago, I went to Sarajevo to help with the post-war judicial reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The court system there was highly dysfunctional, riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Under the aegis of the Dayton Peace Accords and the authority of the “High Representative,” we—the Independent Judicial Commission—carried out an extremely ambitious agenda of judicial reform. Before we were done, we had overseen a restructuring of the courts (redrawing jurisdictional lines), the dismissal of all judges and prosecutors in the country (followed by a reappointment process of heavily vetted candidates for those positions), the creation of the High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council (HJPC) entirely independent of the executive to oversee the third branch of government, and a sweeping reform of ethics and procedure laws. By 2004, the BiH judiciary had been cleaned up and set on track to function at a very high level and, most importantly, to exercise robust independence.

I returned to Sarajevo in 2010-11 and conducted a survey of all the judges in BiH. Their responses confirmed that almost all the reforms had been effective and had begun to deliver, in large part, on their initial promise. Similar reform efforts took place in many countries around the world, including almost every post-communist state, although few, if any, were as ambitious and comprehensive as the BiH project.

I took great pride in this effort, secure in the knowledge that the Bosnians could learn from the United States’ commitment to judicial independence. However, while working in the international environment I quickly learned that the U.S. legal system was not universally admired. International legal experts were contemptuous of our sweepstakes-style tort system— “watch out not to slip on those icy steps! Oh wait, you’re an American; you’d sue over icy steps! Bwahahaha!”—our contingency fee system, the abomination of plea bargaining and plea deals, etc. But despite these criticisms, the U.S. has always taken pride in the independence of its (at least its federal) judiciary. And, many aspects of the judicial reforms in BiH twenty years ago were patterned after the American and analogous Western European systems.