The Law Commission is to ask New Zealanders how they think judges should be appointed.
The commission is to soon release a paper on how New Zealand's courts are structured and run, including the appointment of judges.
The commission says that, at the moment, the Attorney-General makes recommendations to the Governor-General but there is no formal criteria for those endorsements.
Its president, Sir Grant Hammond, says the process is increasingly criticised, including from within the legal field, as insufficiently transparent.
Sir Grant says critics accuse the judiciary of being insufficiently diverse, pointing to the gender imbalance among judges.
