Why Madrid Is Building The World's Largest Courthouse
On the 2nd of January 2025 the Spanish government approved one of the most far reaching legal reforms of the last two centuries. After many years of attempts, the new law comes in the same year that Madrid will begin construction of its new City of Justice (La Ciudad de Justicia ), a massive complex set to occupy 470,000 square meters — making it the largest courthouse in the world. In this blog I will explain why the new law is such a big deal and explain why Madrid has chosen to invest so much to increase the efficiency of its judicial system.
First you need to understand some key details about the political-administrative structure of Spain. The state is divided into what are called Autonomous Communities (Las Comunidades Autónomas or CC.AA, for short), each with its own governmental assemblies and executives. There are 17 of these Autonomous Communities along with 2 small Autonomous Cities named Ceuta and Melilla, both of which are located with in land area of Morocco.
The Community of Madrid is divided into 179 municipalities. Everyone knows the City of Madrid but do not be confused by the naming duplication. The City of Madrid is just one of the 179 municipalities within the Community of Madrid.
The map below shows the City of Madrid in the center of the Community of Madrid.
As can be expected, there is a wide variation in population size between the municipalities within an Autonomous Community. On one hand the City of Madrid with a population of around 3.5 million residents is a single municipality. On the other hand, the Municipality of Madarcos only has around 50 residents.
In the administration of the judicial system, the basic unit of organization is called a judicial district (Partido Judicial). The municipalities of the Community of Madrid are grouped into 21 of these judicial districts.
The Municipality of Madarcos, mentioned previously, is 1 of the 42 municipalities that fall under the judicial district of Torrelaguna. Within this judicial district, the total population is around 33,257 residents. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the City of Madrid forms its own judicial district.
Now, what is strange about the judicial system of Spain is that each judicial district has their own sets of Courts of First Instance (Juzgados de Primera Instancia). Moreover, each of these courts only have a single judge — all functioning as discrete units, each with its own staff and resources.
Let’s break this down a bit more without getting too caught up in the organizational details. Each of the 21 judicial districts each have their own trail courts for family matters, small crimes, commercial matters and so on. So at a very minimum you would expect there to be 21 courts for family matters, 21 courts for commercial matters, and so on. But this is exacerbated by the fact that a “court” at this level has only 1 judge. If there was a “court” that had 7 judges then it would mean that a matter can be allocated to one of the 7 judges. But if a court only has 1 judge then you can see how everything can be extremely inefficient.
And shockingly this is the case. Because of this single-judge structure, the judicial districts together have 130 Courts of First Instance, 54 Criminal Courts (Juzgados de lo Penal), 34 Administrative Courts (Juzgados de lo Contencioso Administrativo), and so on. All of the different Autonomous Communities have a similar judicial organization.
This way of organization dates back to a law from 1870 when the system was first designed (Ley provisional sobre organización del Poder Judicial, de 15 de septiembre de 1870) and with some reforms made in 1985 (La Ley Orgánica 6/1985, de 1 de julio, del Poder Judicial). Even with the 1985 reforms the basic 19th century structure of first instance courts was kept. In any case, this is sufficient background detail.
In the last few years, the Government of the Community of Madrid, has been working to centralized the first instance courts in key locations to optimize of the delivery of justice.
One substantial improvement done by the Community of Madrid in 2019 was to organize 97 courts of first instance into three adjacent buildings. But this is just a part of the larger plan.
The further centralize the courts, the government of Madrid has approved plans to build a new judicial complex that will cluster all major court activities within the Community of Madrid. It has been dubbed the City of Justice. It will unify a total of 27 judicial headquarters now distributed throughout the city. Between 10 and 13 buildings will be built.
Currently, the largest courthouse in the world is Justice Palace in Istanbul at around 300,000 m2. Given the ambition of City of Justice to be around 470,000 m2 it will easily take the top spot.
The City of Justice was first envisioned in 2005 by the former President of Madrid Esperanza Aguirre (PP). But finally achieved Budget approvals by Isabel Díaz Ayuso (also from PP) and her absolute majority in the Madrid parliament. Ayuso has frequently emphasized that an efficient and independent judicial system the key to the liberal prosperity of Madrid (I discussed her on my podcast).
This amount of space is also 61% larger than the aggregate of all courts currently existing in Madrid. Also, the plan also includes additional land so the City of Justice can grow over the next 40 years to always be able to deliver services efficiently without being constrained by space. This is particularly interesting since the government of Madrid expects their population to steadily increase over that time. This is actually born out by recent data — mostly from Latin American immigration.
But something big just happened that will allow Madrid to further accelerate its plans to make its judicial system more efficient.
Right after the year began, on January 2 the national government approved a watershed reform of the judicial system. So comprehensive that I did not even think countries were still capable of getting these laws approved in a national parliament.
With the approval of LO 1/2025 (“on measures regarding the efficiency of the Public Justice Service”) the entire structure of single-judge courts that have specific legal foci that I explained above has been dissolved. They will be replaced by multi-judge courts with sections that have different specializations.
According to the new law each judicial district will have one Tribunal of First Instance (Tribunal de Instancia), which functions as a collegiate body containing multiple specialized sections. This represents a fundamental shift from individual judicial units to an integrated organizational model.
Moreover, the reform also introduces greater flexibility in territorial organization. While the previous system rigidly confined each court (Juzgado) to its designated territory, the new law allows sections of the Tribunal de Instancia to extend their jurisdiction beyond their judicial district, even across provincial boundaries (for Autonomous Communities with provinces) within the same Community High Court of Justice region. This flexibility enables more efficient resource allocation and specialized expertise sharing.
The new law affects the entire nation of Spain and not just Madrid. I have only focused on Madrid to give concrete examples.
Furthermore, the law provides sweeping reforms to enable the use of digitization of legal proceedings and alternative dispute resolutions (ADR). Even going so far as providing preferential tax treatment of awards that arise from ADR. Unfortunately, this quick blog cannot detail all of the great reforms within this law.
The digitization aspect is particularly exciting. It would be possible to have a smaller justice office in a more rural district that has an online interface with the main court complex, meaning that persons will not always have to travel long distances for court. Remember that Spain has many sparsely populated districts.
So, because of the new national judicial organization law, the City of Justice in Madrid will be able to double down on its judicial clustering by enabling an unprecedented freedom of optimizing legal and administrative resources across courts of first instance to make full use of economies of agglomeration.
Yet again, this is how Madrid wins.