I believe Alec Nove makes this distinction in his studies ofSoviet planning.

See the "Introduction" in Albert H. Rubenstein and ChadwickHaberstroh, eds.. Some Theories of Organization^ 2nd ed.(Homewood, 111.: Richard D. Irwin, 1966).

12The phrase, and the idea, are Aaron Wildavsky's; I recall themfrom a draft manuscript no longer in my possession which I readsome time ago. I think this view would also be consistent withmuch of Yehezkel Dror's thinking.

13Henry Aaron, Politics and the Professors (Washington, D.C:Brookings, 1978).

Giandomenico Ma jo:Policy Sciences 6:1 (March, 1975), p. 56.

14Giandomenico Majone, "The Feasibility of Social Policies," in

Alan Stone, M.D., Mental Health and the Law: A System inTransition (Washington, D.C: National Institute of MentalHealth, 1976), pp. 121-122.

16Stone suggests the many conflicting interests and difficultiesin deinstitutionalizing the retarded; but also see, Valerie J.Bradley, Deinstitutionalization of Developmentally DisabledPersons: A Conceptual Analysis and Guide (Baltimore: UniversityPark Press, 1978).

Judicial Reform: Basic Issues and ReferencesRussell Wheeler, Federal Judici'a/ Center

Courts are a major cog in our society's machinery of norm enforce-ment, dispute resolution, and resource allocation. They serve indi-vidual litigants and in the course of doing that serve general socialinterests. Daily court decisions apply rules and thus lend dependa-bility to social intercourse, and in relatively rare but consequentialcases, court decisions have an impact well beyond the immediate caseat hand and may signal major shifts in social policy. Moreover, courtsconsume tax resources, and are accountable to the public on thatscore.

Thus, judicial administration policies—how courts should bestructured, staffed, and operated—have long been matters of atleast passing interest. In this century these policies have had a cer-tain core constituency which developed when the conservative wing ofthe Progressive movement tried to bring to the courts what RoscoePound called, in language characteristic of the age, "the highest sci-entific standards in the administration of justice" (Pound 1906p. 401).

For the last decade or so, during a period of pervasive interestm pohcy administration, judicial administration has been something

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of a growth industry. Concern over the so-called "criminal justicesystem" has provided an influx of federal dollars into states andlocalities, some of it supporting courts, court research, and court-related action organizations. This has occurred at the same time thatChief Justices Warren and Burger urged greater attention to admin-istrative matters. Earl Warren said, after his retirement, that"Ctihe most important job of the courts today is not to decide whatthe substantive law is, but to work out ways to move the cases alongand relieve court congestion" (Wheeler and Whitcomb, 1977, p . 30).Not unrelated to this, Supreme Court decisions on rights of theaccused fostered scrutiny of how trial courts actually operate.

In recent years, long-time judicial administration groups—mostobviously the American Judicature Society (200 W. Monroe, Chicago,Illinois 60606) and the Institute of Judicial Administration (1 Wash-ington Square Village, New York 10012)—were joined in 1968 by theFederal Judicial Center (1520 H Street, N.W., Washington, D.C.20005), the federal courts' statutory agency for judicial administra-tion research and development, and in 1971 by the National Centerfor State Courts (300 Newport Avenue, Williamsburg, Virginia 23185),a private institution. A policy-planning unit in the United StatesDepartment of Justice was upgraded in 1977 to the status of Officefor Improvements in the Administration of Justice, assigned one ofthe ten Assistant Attorney General slots, and has pursued a varietyof matters of state and federal judicial administration.

There are at least four recently published textbooks and/orreaders on the subject (chronologically, Friesen et al . , 1971; Nelson,1974; Wheeler & Whitcomb, 1977, and Berkson et al . , 1977), a mass ofbibliographies—(see Wheeler & Whitcomb, 1977, and Klein, 1975, plusmany in specialized areas)—and a scholarly journal devoted to justicemanagement: The Justice System Journal (published by the Institutefor Court Management, which trains court administrators, 1624 MarketStreet, Denver, Colorado 80202). Also, there is the remarkably im-proved Judicature (published by the American Judicature Society)and the Judges' Journal (published by the Judicial AdministrationDivision of the American Bar Association, 1155 E. 60th, Chicago,Illinois 60637).

Judicial administration policies may be defined normatively as" )policies designed to enable courts to dispose—justly, expeditiously/and economically—of the disputes brought to them for resolution. JDesigning such policies is often depicted as the mechanical challengeof making courts—like trains—run on time by applying some simple"businesslike" techniques to them. Perhaps because the field isheavily influenced by lawyers—who are advocates by training—"reform" proposals have traditionaUy had much more advocacy thanevaluation (Jackson, 1977). As one writer observed fifty years ago,the "success of the entire judicial system" requires only for judicialleaders "to indicate what is needed in specific circumstances, afterfortifying [their] poUcy with statistics" (Quoted in Wheeler and Jack-son, 1976, p . 55). Similar exhortations are not lacking today, butthe complexity of designing sound judicial administration poUcies isbecoming apparent. Increasingly, those who offer prescriptionsrecognize, as several students of appellate courts put i t , that "thevalues at stake are delicately balanced, and the circumstances thatcall for remedial measures are too rapidly changing to encourage usto claim certitude" (Carrington, et al . , 1976, p . viii).

Moreover, those interested in judicial administration are in-creasingly recognizing the value of informing their efforts withbroader social, behavioral, and organizational analyses. These anal-yses can enhance more practical inquiries if they improve knowledgeof the dynamics of court behavior. So far, the impact on judicialadministration research of this other research is most obvious inanalyses of the cultural and operational characteristics of trial courtsand to a lesser degree in analyses of overall court system management.For instance, the recent solicitation by the National Institute of LawEnforcement and Criminal Justice (1978) for pretrial research proposalsis thoroughly informed by relevant social science inquiry. A recentissue of Judicature (September 1978) explained the Society's trialcourt delay project and included articles on theory building in thearea of trial court delay and on the application of various operationsresearch techniques to courts (as well as an empirically based caveaton the consequences of appljring management science to the courts).The frequently cited articles by Saari (1976) and Gallas (1976) onstate court management are similarly instructive.

What follows is an overview of current issues and references injudicial administration, designed to portray the field with some sem-blance of clarity, but recognizing that oversimplification is inevitablein such an effort. (I should say, at this point, that throughout thearticle I have tried to provide a familiarity with the literature ofjudicial administration, not by copious bibliographical references, butby references to sources rich themselves in citations to the literature.)

COURT OBJECTIVES. Courts exist to do justice in individual disputesby "finding the facts" of the dispute and then applying legal normsin constitutions, statutes, and prior decisions. While roughly nine outof ten cases brought to court are resolved without reaching the trialstage, these fundamental assumptions of judicial fact finding and normapplication set a framework of expectations about how courts willbehave.

Providing justice is obviously the basic and ultimate objective ofcourts, but the courts' obligations can also be compromised if twoother objectives are not met. One is timeliness. A just dispositionmeans less if it can be had only after an extended passage of timeduring which facts grow stale and the intrinsic value of an award orpunishment is mitigated. On the other hand, the judicial process'sability to find the facts and apply the law may be threatened if thereis a rush to termination. So too, the courts' ability to do justice iscompromised when the monetary costs of maintaining litigation areprohibitively expensive (see Posner, 1973)—or if public resourcescommitted to courts are inadequate to meet the necessary administra-tive costs.

On a broad conceptual scale, these several objectives are usuallybalanced one against another in a general admonition such as: "Theobjective and responsibility of our legal system is to produce thehighest quality of justice in the shortest time and at the lowest costconsistent therewith" (Will, 1971, p . 15).

There have been some efforts to express these basic courtobjectives quantitatively:

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Justice. Claims that "you can't measure justice," while surely truein some degree, take a rather unimaginative view of the possibilitiesof determining empirically whether courts treat like-situated indi-viduals alike. One of the clearest areas in which justice outcomeshave been measured is in the area of sentencing—do defendants con-victed of similar crimes and with similar backgrounds nevertheless getdifferent sentences? One effort to provide an empirical answer to thisquestion was a 1974 project by the Federal Judicial Center (Partridgeand Eldridge), by which researchers exposed panels of judges toidentical presentence reports and asked them to indicate the senten-ces they would give. The project found substantial disparities, evenwith the identical stimuli. Other research has examined outcomes inother settings (Eisenstein and Jacob, 1977, parts 2 and 3).

Time. The time variable has been the most extensively analyzed andpreached about of this trilogy of court objectives. It is surely amore complex variable than would be suggested by the time-worn sawthat "justice delayed is justice denied"—constantly invoked but hardlya definitive guide for judicial administration policy.

Generally, delay can be defined as "the time between a case'sfiling and disposition that is not conducive to a just determinationand that could be eliminated by administrative measures and/or theresolve to do so" (Wheeler and Whitcomb, 1977, p . 15). This recog-nizes that a certain amount of time is needed to prepare a case forjudicial resolution but that beyond that point, time passage does notserve the objective interests that courts exist to serve. There are,of course, a host of subjective interests—such as wearing out one'sopponent—that delay does serve, and pursuit of these interestsaccounts for much delay (Levin, 1977).

There have been a multitude of efforts to set standards for theallowable time between filing and disposition of a case. The AmericanBar Association Commission on Standards of Judicial Administration,for one example, has promulgated the fairly common view that no morethan six months should elapse between the filing of a normal civil caseand the start of trial. (ABA, 1976, p . 93. There are, in fact, manynecessary variations on this statement. Some would measure delayfrom when the case is "at issue" rather than filed. And, of course,most cases do not actually go to trial but can be measured accordingto the time of termination.) Data on trial court performance (as sum-marized and analysed, for example in Church, 1978; Flanders, 1977;and Levin, 1975) suggest that courts vary widely in their ability (orwillingness) to meet such standards.

Similarly, numerous jurisdictions have promulgated so-calledspeedy trial acts with maximum tolerable delays in criminal cases (Fort,1978); the effects of those acts are varied, but such perjorativedescriptions of the federal Speedy Trial Act of 1974 as the "speedyconviction act" suggests the possibility that cne measure of performance—speed—may be had only with sacrifice of other court objectives.The door is wide open for further research in this area.

Costs. The cost of litigation has been the object of much less scrutinythan has the time that cases consume, which is not uninteresting,since theoretically, both variables can be measured on integral scales.Rigorous analysis of costs would require data such as those on law

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firm billing practices, and might lead eventually to scrutiny of thosepractices—efforts that the bar will hardly encourage. Courts haveruled that certain monetary requirements—viz., the costs of attor-neys' services and of transcripts—cannot deny persons access tothe courts. There has hardly been, however, the same effort to mea-sure the cost of litigation—as opposed to time—or to set standards bywhich to measure court performance in this regard, beyond variouscourt decisions awarding attorneys' fees.

However, the recent increase in the volume of complaints aboutthe costs of litigation—especially civil litigation—may increaseknowledge of costs, perhaps as seen in a $1.3 million grant recentlyawarded by the Office for Improvements in the Administration ofJustice to a University of Wisconsin-based team for a study of civillitigation, with an emphasis on costs, broadly defined.

The public cost of courts—i.e., the public tax resources theyconsume—is similarly understudied, although United States juris-dictions commonly spend something less than one percent of theirtotal budget on the courts. Earl Johnson (1978) and his associates,based on comparative data on resource allocations for courts, findthat America spends much less on courts than do other industrializednations.

CAUSES AND REMEDIES. In any court setting, particular aspects ofjustice, time, or costs can be subjected to discrete analysis, but fora broad overview look, It is helpful to examine generally the attribu-table causes of court malperformance and corresponding remediesthat are proffered for them. Discussion of these general judicialadministration policy proposals merits the caveat that many havedeveloped without the evaluation necessary to distinguish nostrumsfrom effective programs.

Demand Reduction. Courts may be unable to do justice because ofthe amount, or type, of disputes brought to them—and there is afairly firm view that in the last decade or so, the caseloads have beenincreasing substantially. Perceptions that courts are expected toresolve problems that other institutions are better equipped to re-resolve—or that courts are asked to solve more disputes than theirresources will allow—have long fueled "dejudicialization" efforts.The aim is to identify those disputes with which courts are leastequipped to deal and either shift them to other forums, or simplyterminate organized social attention to them at all. This was Pound'sobjective in 1906, when he noted that the aggregate resolution of cer-tain potential conflicts by administrative agencies was superior to the"scheme of individual initiative" on which litigation is based. "Anaction for damages is no comfort to us when we are sold diseased beefor poisoned can goods" (403-04).

Small claims courts and workmen's compensation plans are earlyforerunners of the current list of alternatives to conventional adju-dication, ranging from no-fault insurance and arbitration (Johnson,1976), to a renewed interest in small claims courts (Ruhnka et al . ,1978). The Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justiceis currently funding, as demonstration projects, three "NeighborhoodJustice Centers," based in part on Sander's (1976) analysis to theeffect that disputes have varying characteristics that can determine

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the best form in which to handle them. Many disputes, for example,occur in the framework of on-going personal relationships that anysingle, authoritative, judicial decision is unlikely to affect.

Other cases seem to present so many issues and involve so manyinterests beyond those of the immediate parties to the case, thatcourts will have to devise new modes of litigation to be able to handlethem. So called "extended impact cases," where judges must assume,for a period of several years, control of state prison or mental healthfacilities, strain regular judicial forums, which were designed to lookretrospectively at a dispute and restore the status quo that it upset.Problems of guiding implementation of many-sided decrees and pro-tecting all interests in, say, a prison administration case, call forprospective judging and strategies of implementation (Harvard LawReview, 1977). (Some cases, however, seem frustratingly inappro-priate for judicial resolution, at least under current rules, becausethey are "too big;" an example is the Justice Department's antitrustsuit against IBM, now moving into its second decade—with no end insight.)

Despite the care with which some "dejudicialization" efforts arecarried out, there remains a not uncommon perception that the endresult—if not the objective—of some such efforts is to reserve thejudicial forum for the wealthy and rid the courts of grievances thatother agencies of government also refuse to redress (Higginbotham,1976).

Resources Augmentation. If courts are given more business than theycan process with the resources at hand, another solution may be tofind ways to increase judicial resources. Thus, there has been in-creased emphasis on budgeting and appropriations techniques andstrategies to improve the courts' ability to compete for resources.One line of analysis has insisted that the courts' best hope for ade-quate budgeting is to have all the courts in a state receive fundsfrom one source, the state legislature, and concomitantly, to central-ize the appropriations and budgeting responsibilities for all courtsof a state in the state supreme court and state court administrator.This, it is said, will improve the courts' ability to secure fundsand provide more equal distribution of resources to courts throughoutthe state. Others have argued that locally-based courts will not ac-cept centralized funding if it is linked to central control, and that,while state funding may be desirable to equalize resources, statebudgeting is stifling, and that instead state courts should "developtechniques for effective management and planning that spread admin-istrative power throughout all elements of the judicial branch" (Baar,1975, p . 172).

There has also been some attention to what particular appropria-tions strategies are likely to be most successful (Baar and Baar,1977). Similarly, courts have long been agiitated by their inabilityto convince legislators to provide what courts regard as an adequatenumber of judgeships. The legislatures' willingness to act is depen-dent on such factors as the patronage it might provide them, as weUas their skepticism—often justified—that courts are able to estimatetheir judgeship needs accurately.

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As with the question of adjusting the courts' jurisdiction, how-ever, the question of the optimal level of court resources is farfrom a mechanical one. While most courts hunger for more judges,more supporting personnel, and more money, some judges are fondof quoting Felix Frankfurter's observation that too many judgeswould produce "a depreciation of the judicial currency and the conse-quent impairment of the prestige and of the efficacy of the . . .courts"(Lumberman's Mutual Cas. Co. v . Elbert, 348 U.S. 48, 59 (1954)).Appellate judges also worry that too many law clerks pose a threatto their ability to control the product of their chambers, and thatpermanent staff law clerks may develop an institutionalized approachto legal problems that threatens the judges' control of the court'scase law (Carrington, et al . , 1976).

Some courts are trying to find better means to allocate resources.Thus, there are efforts to develop refined methods to forecast case-loads (Goldman et al . , 1976) and tie the forecasts to comparativejudicial and support resources needed to terminate cases of differenttypes. The states of California and Washington, for example, havedone much work on case weighting, and the Federal Judicial Centeris currently revising the case weights used in that system. Therehas been, moreover, a certain fascination as of late with predictingthe "impact" on the courts of prospective legislation—the amount oflitigation that new statutes will generate, apparently in the beliefthat commensurate resources will then be provided to the courts.The Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice is cur-rently funding a project to develop techniques for producing what arenow being called "Justice Resource Estimates." The feasibility ofsuch efforts has also been the subject of a National Academy of Sci-ences panel studying legislative impact on the courts.

Personnel and Management (Ihanges. In the final analysis, the courts'ability to meet their institutional objectives is likely to come mainlyfrom more effective and efficient use of the resources at hand. Legis-lators, and others, tend to be unconvinced that courts use effi-ciently the resources they have—and they are right to varying de-grees , depending on the court. Judicial administration policies toachieve more effective use of resources include personnel policies,as well as court and case management policies.

Traditionally, the judicial community has thought that thechief guarantee for an effective judiciary was to provide judgesindependence through secure tenure and salaries, so they would notfear recrimination for unpopular decisions. State courts are grad-ually (but by no means completely) approaching the federal system—in effect life tenure—by providing for longer judicial terms and reten-tion in office by simple referendum elections. In fact, however, fewjudges are removed by elections. (The view has hardly disappeared,it should be noted, that judicial independence is less important thanpopular accountability. Those who hold to that view would retainjudicial elections or, for example, make federal judges subject toperiodic legislative review.) Judicial salaries—at least in recentmemory—have not been used as a threat to judicial independence,although they are a chronic source of complaint from judges who saytheir salaries are too low. Just how, if at all, salary malaise affectsjudicial recruitment and performance has not been exploredempirically—perhaps an impossible measurement task in any event.

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This century has seen much attention to auxiliary ways tosecure quaUty judicial performance. The "judicial reform" communityis strongly committed to so-called "merit selection of judges:"having a presumably non-partisan commission propose nominees to anappointing authority. Proponents of such plans accept, intuitively,the view that this process is superior to any other method in findingquality judges, and thus have not apologized for labelling the plan"merit selection."

Whether better judges come on the bench as a consequence ofsuch systems is still open to question, and may never be answeredwith certainty. That there are differences in the characteristics ofjudges selected under various systems appears to be true at leastto a degree (Nagel), and there is some evidence that selection sys-tems can help explain differences in—although not necessarilyimprove—judicial outcomes (Nagel, 1973; Levin, 1977). Objective datawill never determine conclusively the "best" selection system and thusit is noteworthy that the co-author of the most comprehensive and dis-passionate empirical analysis of the operation of such a plan (Watsonand Downing, 1969) has endorsed them with modifications, at least tothe extent that "we should abandon elective systems for choosingjudges" because "electoral contests are simply not appropriate mech-anisms for choosing members of the bench" (Watson, 1975, p . 18).There is nothing inconsistent with this statement and SenatorStevenson's (1978) view that the appointive system for federal judi-cial selection would not be improved by the involvement of commissionsthat are currently being promoted by President Carter. The federalsystem provides, in a structured but relatively informal manner,access to the process by various legal and political groups with alegitimate interest in judicial selection.

A more recent preoccupation of the judicial reform community isto promote commissions (within the judiciary) to investigate and todiscipline judges, since traditional methods of impeachment have beenrarely used. The debate over removal has taken on some of thewooden characteristics of the selection debate. Commissions have evi-dently worked well in California, where first created, and have sincespread to almost all states (Tesitor, 1978). Supporters of a federaltenure commission have usually relied on the few number of impeach-ments (nine) and convictions (four) of federal judges, without consid-ering the success of more informal methods that federal judges haveused to convince errant judges to change their ways or to leave thebench (Flanders and McDermott, 1978).

In the last quarter century, there has been attention to judicialeducation as a means of improving or maintaining judicial skills. Na-tional programs began in 1956 with the annual Appellate Judges Semi-nar at the New York University Law School, and state judges at alllevels have attended the National Judicial College affiliated with theUniversity of Nevada at Reno. Federal judges receive continuing edu-cation through the Federal Judicial Center. All these programs—andthe in-state programs that are increasingly being developed—refiectthe realization that the skills of a successful law practitioner (whichhelp one attain the bench) are not necessarily the same as those thatmake a good judge (Alpert, et al. , 1979), and thus some orientationis needed. Continuing education is consistent with the recent empha-sis on the professional responsibility to maintain professional

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skills. Whether these programs actually bear out the enthusiasticreports of their boosters, however, is still unclear (Cook, 1971;Carp and Wheeler, 1972).

Another response to personnel obstacles to effective courtperformance is to create new personnel positions. Thus, appellatejudges are abandoning their sole reliance on "elbow" (one year lawclerks) for professional, or staff, law clerks to assist in legal re-search. While permanent clerks obviously need not be orientedeach year, and presumably enjoy a greater familiarity with the courts'and judges' operating styles and procedures, there is concern thatstaff law clerks can develop their own institutional views of the law,thus provoking an internal tension between judges and staff (Car-rington, et al.).

Perhaps a more well known institutional change within the courtsis the growth in court administrator positions, a phenomenon of thelast three decades. Court administrators play a variety of roles,determined in part by their formal assignments, and in part by theclimate of the courthouse and their skills in becoming perceived asuseful. Formal duties are usually standard—budgeting, personnel,space and facilities, etc. Actual achievements of court administratorspresumably vary greatly (Center for the Study of Federalism).

Until recently, no one has paid much attention to court systemspersonnel policies, but now there is research on court unionization(Cole, 1978), discrimination in hiring and advancement (Hepperle andHendrix, 1978; Suitt, 1978), as well as a fresh look at court person-nel policies as part of a broadened effort to apply contemporarymanagement approaches to the courts.

ACHIEVING MORE EFFECTIVE CASE PROCESSING. Basically, thisheading includes discussion of several categories of case processingtechniques.

Technology. There has been an intense interest in various kinds oftechnological changes and innovations to enable courts to store andretrieve information more efficiently than by use of paper records(Polansky, 1978). Extensive discussion of such developments is notnecessary here. While the need for some technological changes can-not be gainsaid, courts have shown a consistent tendency to regardcomputers—"modem business machines"—as a panacea. Thus, theyoften launch technological innovations far more extensive than theyneed, and expect technology to provide solutions to conditions thatstem from personnel or operational characteristics of the courts.There has been relatively little analysis of the impact of automaticdata processing systems on existent organizational relationships inthe courts (Albrecht, 1976).

Simplification. Simplification or elimination of procedures that do notcontribute to the courts' purposes compromises another bag of pro-posals; "simplification" often appears quite mechanical on the surfacebut is often quite substantive. A good and pervasive example is seenin proposals to reduce the size of juries. Some judges have longargued that juries, at least in civil cases, should be reduced or eveneliminated, presumably because they reach a less reliable decisionthan judges and take longer to do it. Movement to six-person juries

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reflects the view, expressed by Justice White in an opinion for theSupreme Court, that "[wjhat few experiments have occurred—usuallyin the civil area—indicate that there is no discernable differencebetween the results reached by [six and twelve person juries]"(Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78 at 101 (1970)). Thus, some argue,the cost savings in calling fewer jurors can be had without changingthe courts' outcomes. While most federal courts have switched tosix person civil juries and while many states have had their use ofless-than-twelve approved, one major consequence of the Williamsdecision and its progeny was a spate of scholarly articles analyzing,with depth and conflicting conclusions, the impression Justice Whitehad gained from the limited evidence before him (Saks, 1977). Othersremain unconvinced that eliminating juries saves time (since judgeshave to write up the conclusions they must reach in the jury's stead)or that the popularizing effect that juries bring should be eliminated.

Another example of simplification is appellate courts' eliminatingoral arguments and written opinions in many cases, citing both docketpressures and the view that oral argument adds little to the recordand published opinions in many cases would add little but confusionto the law. While the cutback on these procedures in many ways isin line with long-held perceptions of their superfluity in many appel-late cases, these moves have provoked a great deal of consternationfrom the bar, who query, with reason, whether appellate courts shouldeliminate the only two main points of public contact they have in theappellate decisional process. What accountability can judges feel ifthey need not face the attorneys in argument, or explain their deci-sions (Carrington, et al.)?

Shifting the Locus of Litigation Control. A basic judicial reformtheme throughout the century has been a plea to abandon what Poundin 1906 called the view "that the parties should fight out their owngame in their own way without judicial interference" (Pound, p. 347).Implicit in this statement is a recognition that while the adversaries ina law suit want justice, they naturally see a "just outcome'' in differentways. It follows, according to this view, that the courts' missionwill be served only if courts regard the disposition of cases as thepublic's business and take an active hand in seeing that cases areterminated as economically and expeditiously as possible, consistentwith justice. Indeed, because litigation so frequently involves an un-equal balance of experience and resources among the parties, somehave urged that courts vastly increase their monitoring and super-vision of cases to protect those litigators unable to compete withrepeat litigators such as business firms (Galanter, 1975).

The vehicles to the end of greater judicial control are variedand have been somewhat cyclical in their popularity. Basically though,they amount to a variety of procedures by which (1) to clarify, beforeany trial, what is actually at issue in the case, and (2) to keep lawyersaccountable to a schedule set in advance. At the least, it is thought,these processes will allow the case to go to trial on only the essentialpoints of disagreement. In many cases, the hope is that a full airingof the case, and eliminating the availability of delay as a tactic, willproduce a just termination without trial by forcing the parties toassess the relative merits of the case and settle it.

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The means to the first objective above are pretrial conferencesand pretrial discovery: discovery to allow each side to learn, pnor totrial, what evidence the opponent actually has, and conferences to allowthe judge to guide the process and keep the litigation on schedule. Inrecent years, concern has grown that these pretrial procedures—aimedat clearing up the case for resolution—have in some circumstancessimply added another, almost ritualistic, layer of time-consuming andexpensive conferences (Flanders, 1977; Church, 1978; Nimmer, 1975).As Nimmer observes in describing why consolidated pretrial criminalhearings did not speed dispositions in courts that already reliedheavily on negotiated plea-processes: "Desirable results can beachieved through reforms only if they recognize and take advantageof the underlining rationales and interests exhibited in prevailingpractices" (p. 229).

Especially on the civil side, moreover, such procedures may bevehicles for significant abuse, as when one party seeks to discovermasses of documents that the other party can produce only at greatcosts. If this is true, however, it is not necessarily true for allcases (Connolly, et al . , 1978).

Two studies (Flanders, 1977; Church, 1978) of civil litigationin federal and state courts respectively have recently appeared withparallel conclusions on the variables that most explain time disposi-tion. Basically, they find that the court's success in meeting thejust, expeditious, and economical case disposition is determined lessby extensive and consistent pretrial judicial involvement and more bythe courts' setting firm schedules for completion of various pretrialevents and holding the attorneys to the schedules.

MANAGEMENT CHANGES TO ACHIEVE PERSONNEL AND PROCEDURALCHANGES^ Finally, judicial administration has asked what manage-ment forms and techniques will induce court personnel to adopt neces-sary changes in personnel policy and to use the procedures that mightmake a differences. This question breaks down into three more par-ticular and intertwined questions, all of which deal in one way oranother with how to affect not simply procedures but attitudes ofcourt personnel.

First, What Are the Management Tools to Be Used? One is the rule-making process; here, a ''court rule" refers, not to the rule of lawannounced in a case decision, but to a "rule of court," adopted bythe court through administrative means. Rules stipulate proceduresto be followed in processing cases (procedural rules) or for thecourts' administration (administrative rules)(Grau, 1978). Rules area necessary component of contemporary judicial administration, butcourts, by their nature, may tend to rely too heavily on such formalprescriptions to the exclusion of other devices.

It is true, of course, that skillful judges have long used moresubtle tacts of persuasion, cajoling, and bargaining to get colleaguesto adopt various procedures, but relatively little of this has been docu-mented, other than in presentations at formal continuing educationprogrcmns. One recent and visible effort to apply a management prin-ciple to courts is seen in the resurrection of the so-called "individualcalendar system" by which the cases are assigned to one judge andare his or her responsibility from filing to termination. This was the

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traditional system until courts, in the 1920s and 1930s, began toadopt the "master calendar," with a functional division of labor:one judge makes assignments, another hears motions, another con-ducts pre-trial conferences, another conducts trials, and the like.Some courts, especially federal courts, have turned back to theindividual calendar in recent years in the hopes that such a manage-ment system, combined with an effective information system, willfocus responsibility on judges and induce them, at the risk of embar-rassment from their comparative disposition rates, to process casesmore swiftly.

Second, Where in a Court System Should Management ResponsibilityBe Located? Traditionally, court reformers have assumed that theonly rational administrative model of a court system is one that paral-lels its judicial structure—that is, overall judicial administration policyshould be made by the same body that is supposed to make overalljudicial policy, namely the jurisdictions' highest appellate court,aided by an administrative office. Thus a "unified court system"—with central budgeting, rulemaking, and management systems—haslong been the cherished object of court reformers, and they wouldmeasure any particular state's degree of "advancement" by the vari-ous indices of court unification.

Until recently, this unification movement has been resistedprimarily by local judges who resented outside control; there is, to besure, at least a certain degree of parochialism in such resistance.The resistance has recently achieved some intellectual backing, how-ever, in articles that argue—not that unification per se is bad—butthat the structure of any court system must be consistent with basicdemogfraphic and cultural realities in a state. That is to say, justiceis not automatically increased if a local judge is taking orders froma central administrator, especially if the local judge is professionallycompetent and can take account of special needs and conditions in hislocale (Saari, 1976; Gallas, 1976; see also, Berkson and Carbon, 1978)The bottom line by which to measure any court systems' administra-tive structure is not its degree of unification but the system's capa-bility to deliver justice that is of high quality and basically uniformthroughout the state. While two researchers have said that courtleaders can recognize the need for a unified court system as easilyand as accurately as a captain of a ship can recognize where itsbilge pump is located (Berkson and Carbon, 1978, p . 29), there isgenerally a growing appreciation of the complexity and ambiguity ofcourt organizational variables. Indeed, one of NILECJ's major cur-rent research thrusts is "whether a unified court system results ina more effective and equitable system than a nonunified system"(1978b, p . 15).

Relationships with, and Accountability to, Non-Court Actors. A finalquestion of judicial administration policy concerns the degree ofaccountability court managers owe to various public groups and otheragencies of the government. While there is relatively little argument,for example, that judicial independence is not violated because courtsget money from legislative appropriations (Baar, 1975), there is sub-stantially less agreement about the proper legislative role in courtrule-making (Grau, 1978; Wheeler, 1979). Baar (1974) and othershave worried on another front that in recent years the courts' desireto participate in executive (LEAA) funding programs and to "coop-erate" in the "war on crime" has led them to participate too freely in

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a criminal justice system that, by definition, expects fudges to shareobircta'ves \^th police, prosecutors, defense counsel, and others.

So, too, the courts' accountability to the pubUc is problematic.f i t d ith a recent opinion surv

So, too, the courts a c c o u n y pState court systems have been fascinated with a recent opinion survey

'^th N t i l Cn t e r for State Courts (1978) ^ ^ g thatState court systems have been fascinated psponsored by'^the National Center for State Courts (1978)there is little public knowledge of, or confidence m, the courts. However, the use to which these data can and should be put is hardlyclear.

* * *

It might be customary in an overview article such as this toconclude with a list of major poUcy questions currently on the agenda.To be sure, some are now especially salient: How effective arealternative dispute resolution mechanisms (and measured by whatstandards)? What techniques do indeed reduce court delay and stillinsure fairness? What is the link if any between a court system sdegree of unification and the quality of its justice? In concludingthis article, however, it should also be stressed that the field ofjudicial administration is wide-open to evaluation and analysis, pri-marily because it has for so long been guided by hortatory andrhetoric.

REFERENCES

The opinions and points of view are those of Mr. Wheeler, notnecessarily those of the Federal Judicial Center.

ALBRECHT, Gary (1976), "The Effects of Computerized InformationSystems on Juvenile Courts," 2 Justice System Journal 107.

ALPERT, Lenore (1979), Burton Atkins, and Robert Ziller, "Becominga Judge: Transition from Advocate to Arbiter," 62 Judicature325.

AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION (1976) Commission on Standards of JudicialAdministration, Standards Relating to Trial Courts (Chicago:ABA).

BAAR, Carl (1974), "Will Urban Trial Courts Survive the War onCrime?" in The Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed.Herbert Jacob (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications).

(1975), Separate but Subservient: Court Budgeting in theAmerican States (Lexington Books: Lexington, Mass.).

BAAR, Ellen and BAAR, Carl (1972), "Judges as Middlemen? 2 JusticeSystem Journal 210.

BERKSON, Larry (1977), Stephen Hayes, and Susan Carbon, eds. Managingthe State Courts: Text and Readings (St. Paul, Minn.: WestPublishing Co.).

(1978) and Susan Carbon, Court Unification: History Poli-tics and Implementation (Washington, D.C: National Institutefor Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice).

CARP, Robert (1972) and Russell Wheeler, "Sink or Swim: TheSocialization of a Federal District Judge." 21 J. of PublicLaw 359.

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CARRINGTON, Paul (1976), Daniel Meador, and Maurice Rosenberg,Justice on Appeal (St. Paul: West Publishing Co.).

CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF FEDERALISM (1978) Some Second Thoughtsabout Court Administrators.

CHURCH, Thomas (1978) Justice Delayed: The Pace of Litigation inUrban Trial Courts (Williamsburg, Va., National Center forState Courts).

COLE, George (1978) "Unionization and the Courts: Trends and Pros-pects," (Symposium) 4 Justice System Journal, No. 3.

COOK, Beverly (1971) "The Socialization of Federal Judges: Impacton District Court Business." Washington University Law Quar-terly 253.

EISENSTEIN, James (1977) and Herbert Jacob, Felony Justice: AnOrganizational Analysis of Criminal Courts (Boston: LittleBrown & Co.).

FLANDERS, Steven (1978) and John H. McDermott, The Operation ofthe Federal Judicial Councils (Washington, D.C: FederalJudicial Center).

(1977), Case Management and Court Management in United"states District Courts (Washington, D.C: Federal JudicialCenter).

FORT, Burke O'Hara, et al. (1978), Speedy Trial—A SelectedBibliography (Washington, D.C: NILECJ).

FRIESEN, Ernest (1971), Edward Gallas and Nesta Gallas, Managingthe Courts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill).

GALANTER, Marc (1974), "Why the 'Haves' Come Out Ahead: Specula-tions on the Limits of Legal Change," 9 Law and Society Review95.

GALLAS, Geoff (1970), "The Conventional Wisdom of State CourtAdministration: A Critical Assessment and an AlternativeApproach," 2 Justice System Journal 35.

GOLDMAN, Jerry (1976), Richard L. Hooper and Judy Mahaffey, "Case-load Forecasting Models for Federal District Courts /'5 Journal of Legal Studies 201.

GRAU, Charles (1978), Judicial Rule Making: Administration, Accessand Accountability (Chicago, American Judicature Society).

Harvard Law Review (1977), "Implementation Problems in InstitutionalReform," 91: 428. This builds on Chayes, "The Role of theJudge in Ptiblic Law Litigation, 89 Harvard Law Review 1218(1976) .

HEPPERLE, Winifred (1978) and Janice Hendryx, "Women in CourtAdministration" in Hepperle and Laura Crites (eds.) Womenin the Courts (W. Va. NCJC).

HIGGINBOTHAM, A. Leon, Jr. (1976), "The Priority of Hxrnian Rights inCourt Reform," 70 Federal Rules Decisions 134.

JACKSON, Donald (1977), "Program Evaluation in Judicial Adminis-tration," in Berkson, Hayes and Carbon, above.

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JOHNSON, Earl (1977), Valerie Kantor and Elizabeth Schwartz,Outside the Cox2rts: A Study of Diversion Alternatives inCivil Cases (Denver, Colo.: National Center for State Courts).

(1978) and Elizabeth Drew, "This Nation Has Money forEverything—Except the Courts," 17 Judges Journal No. 3(Summer) 17.

KLEIN, Fannie (ed.) (1975), The Administration of Justice in theCourts (2 volumes) (Oceana Publications).

LEVIN, Martin (1975), "Delay in Five Criminal Courts," (1975) 4Journal of Legal Studies 104.

(1977), Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts (Chicago:University of Chicago Press).

NAGEL, Stuart (1973), Comparing Elected and Appointed JudicialSystems (Sage Publications).

NATIONAL CENTER FOR STATE COURTS (1978), State Courts: A Blueprintfor the Future (Williamsburg, Va.) .

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE (1978^),Criminal Justice Research Solicitation: Analysis of Practicesand Behavior that Affect the Pretrial Processes (Washington,D.C : NILECJ) .

(1978b), Program Plan Fiscal Year, 1979.

Nelson, Dorothy (1974), Judicial Administration and the Administra-tion of Justice (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co.).

NIMMER, Raymond (1974) , "Judicial Reform: Infojniial Process andCompeting Effects," in Jacob, cited above.

(1975), Prosecutorial Disclosure and Judicial Reform:The Omnibus Hearing in Two Courts (Chicago: American BarFoundation).

Partridge, Anthony (1974) and William Eldridge, "The Second CircuitSentencing Study," out of print, but excerpted in Austin Saratand Sheldon Goldman, American Court Systems: Readings inJudicial Process and Behavior (San Francisco: W. H. Freemanand Co., 1978).

POSNER, Richard (1973), "An Economic Approach to Legal Procedureand Judicial Administration," 2 Journal of Legal Studies 399,420ff.

POUND, Roscoe (1906), "Causes of Popular Dissatisfaction with theAdministration of Justice," 29 American Bar Association Reports395.

RUHNKA, John (1978), Steven Weller and John Martin, Small ClaimsCourts: A National Examination (Williamsburg, Va.: NationalCenter for State Coxirts) .

SAARI, David (1976), "Modern Covirt Management: Trends in CourtOrganization Concepts—1976," 2 Justice System Journal 19.

SAKS, Michael (1977), Jury Verdicts (Lexington, Mass.: D.C Heath).

SANDERS/ Frank A. E. (1976), "Varieties of Dispute Processing," 70Federal Rules Decision 111.

STEVENSON, Adlai E. Ill (1978), "'Reform' and Judicial Selection,"64 American Bar Association Journal 1683.

SUITTS, Steven (1978), Blacks and Women in Southern Federal Courts(Atlanta: Southern Regional Council).

TESTITOR, Irene (1978), Judicial Conduct Organization (Chicago:American Judicature Society).

WATSON, Richard (1969) and Ronald Downing, The Politics of Benchand Baar (New York: John Wiley).

(1975), "Staffing the Courts—Where Do We Go From Here?"Paper presented to the 1975 Annual Meeting of the AmericanPolitical Science Association.

WHEELER, Russell (1976) and Donald Jackson, "Judicial Councils andPolicy Planning," 2 Justice System Journal 121.

(1977) and Howard Whitcomb, Judicial Administration: Textand Readings (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc.).

(1979), "Broadening Participation in the Courts ThroughRule-Making and Administration," 62 Judicature 280.

WILL, Hubert (1971), "Civil Case [Management]—Filing to Disposi-tion," in Seminars for Newly Appointed District Judges(Federal Judicial Center, 1971), 15-36.

Public Policies for Communities in Economic Crisis:An Overview of the IssuesF. Stevens Redburn and Terry F. Buss, Youngstown State University

A community in economic crisis is one which is not able to pro-duce sufficient jobs for its residents who want to work or which isfailing to produce sufficient income for its members, or which failsto produce critical public goods and services. The onset of a localcrisis may be sudden—as in the case of a major plant or military baseclosing—or gradual. The crisis may affect virtually all sectors or itmay be mainly confined to the public sector—as in the Cleveland orNew York City fiscal crises. A subcommunity—such as black youthor those with less education or skill—may be in crisis while theremainder of the community is not •

Despite its frequency, in this country localized economic crisishas not received attention given to some other problems of comparablemagnitude, e .g . , natural disasters, as a problem worthy of organizedpublic response. One manifestation of the failure to address theseproblems is the absence even of reUable data on current local unem-ployment (Jones and Phares, 1978). Some other nations are much moreprepared than is the U.S. to make the adjustment of localities to

?'"^^ ^^^^ ^ national government responsibility (Ruttenberg,

To what extent is current public policy for communities in eco-nomic crisis based on an adequate understanding of the forces thatpredispose localities to sudden or gradual loss of economic vitality?special attention has recently been focused on the decUne of

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