The Context of Public Bureaucracies: An Organizational Analysis of Federal District Courts

Abstract

An organizational approach to the study of dispositions in United States District Courts is outlined, focusing on the pressures created by the combination of an increasing demand for service together with a relative decline in resources. The functions of courts are identified as adjudication, judicial administration, and policymaking. After stating some of the general theoretical issues involved in the approach taken here, courts are described in terms of the following organizational characteristics: (1) they are networks of organized activities with a mixed collegial and bureaucratic authority structure, as well as informal political processes of coordination, (2) heteronomous, (3) a labor-intensive professional service, (4) a branch of government, (5) nonspecialized, (6) passive, (7) vertically and horizontally interrelated with other organizations, (8) whose tasks are influenced by the demographic, economic, and legalgovernmental characteristics of the jurisdictional environment Theoretically, the output of courts (e.g., the volume and nature of dispositions) is seen as determined by the environmental profile and the complexity of the task structure, with fiscal resources and organizational structure as intervening variables. These major organizational dimensions and variables are illustrated with data on the six District Courts of the Second Circuit. A preliminary statistical analysis presents the effects of the jurisdictional environment on various types of filings in all United States District Courts in 1950, 1960, and 1973. The results confirm one aspect of the historically increasing involvement of government in the economy and society, namely, that which is mediated by the federal courts. The increasing governmental presence is shown in civil litigation involving the United States government as defendant and plaintiff, as well as in the contextual effects on filings of governmental agencies at the federal, state, and local levels. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of three types of responses to the current crisis of the judiciary: the judicial response, emanating from the law-finding and adjudicatory role of courts; the bureaucratic response, reflecting the progressive transformation of adjudication into administration; and the technocratic response, emerging as a synthesis of adjudication and administration and stressing the policy-making function of courts within the context of the modern American politieal economy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.