Scholarship – The Interdependent Third Branch

New research on the internal dynamics of court rulemaking

Amending a Federal Rule of Civil Procedure is an act of intricate teamwork. Finally, some evidence of just how intricate.

Since 1934, the federal court system has been empowered to craft its own rules of procedure and evidence. That work is primarily done by five Advisory Committees, each composed of judges, attorneys, and law professors, who review the existing rules and periodically make recommendations to amend or update them.

FRCP No rule proposal makes everyone happy, and academics in particular often critique the rule changes that the Committees take up (or fail to take up). But in recent years, that criticism has shifted from the substance of the Committees’ work to the composition of the Committees themselves. In particular, academic critics are increasingly content to assert, without any rigorous evidence, that the makeup of the Committees leaves them prone to engage in groupthink or other cognitive biases.

Are those allegations supported by a careful review of the Committees’ work? A rigorous, four-year case study says no. In fact, far from being entities mired in groupthink, the Committees are more akin to expert teams whose decisions are carefully researched and thoroughly considered.

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Jurisdiction stripping is back, this time from the left

Here’s something I wrote about federal judicial accountability:

Many commentators have praised Article III’s guarantees of life tenure and freedom from salary cuts as essential tools to preserve judicial independence. Far less frequently have the commentators explored the impact of these guarantees on judicial accountability. Rather, until relatively recently, the prevalent assumption (dating back to the original Federalist debates) has been that “the perceived need for judicial accountability to counterbalance life tenure, nonreducible salaries, and judicial review, began and ended with the impeachment mechanism.” A reexamination of that assumption, however, has been sparked in the early twenty-first century both by academic commentators and some in Congress. The last ten years alone have produced a host of creative— sometimes outrageous—alternatives to promote federal judicial accountability through (in most cases) a combination of executive and legislative power and populist sentiment. Some such proposals are effectively substance-neutral, most notably replacing life tenure with fixed, lengthy judicial terms. Other proposals, however, are aimed at the substance of judicial decision-making, among them several schemes to strip federal courts of jurisdiction to hear certain types of cases. Prominent politicians have even occasionally threatened impeachment—or worse—for federal judges as a punishment for decisions they did not find appropriate. Contributing to the tenor of politically “accountable” judges is a federal judicial appointment process that has become increasingly partisan in the last two decades.

This paragraph was part of the introduction to an article I co-wrote twelve years ago, and yet it feels surprisingly fresh. The difference is that while many of the efforts to subject the court to populism and political sentiment a decade ago came from conservatives, today those same views are being embraced by the liberal establishment. Countless bad ideas — Court packing, term limits, and the like — continue to emerge, with the most recent being the rediscovery of jurisdiction-stripping. Bloomberg Businessweek explains:

Some liberal proponents believe jurisdiction stripping could help Democrats shield bold future legislation from damaging court battles. In theory a Democratic Congress could pass a health-care plan or a Green New Deal with a provision stipulating that the legislation lies outside the bounds of Supreme Court review.

Under variations of the jurisdiction-stripping proposal, Democratic lawmakers could also limit the ability of lower courts to review legislation or could confine legal challenges to geographic regions where courts are generally sympathetic.

Let’s be clear about what’s happening. Today’s politicians, unable or unwilling to do the hard work of compromise and dealmaking, are leaving the courts to make sense of hastily written and sloppy laws. When lawmakers don’t like the results, they propose extreme “fixes” which would deny the courts the ability to do even their core adjudicative work. This is wrong, whether it comes from the right or the left, and is symptomatic of how awful our political class — and their academic enablers — have become.

JOTWELL review of Reichman et al. on technology and the regulation of judges

I am delighted to have a new essay up on JOTWELL, reviewing Amnon Reichman, Yair Sagy, and Shlomi Balaban’s recent article, From a Panacea to a Panopticon: The Use and Misuse of Technology in the Regulation of Judges. It’s a terrific look at the Israeli’s courts’ development of case management technology, and the impact of that technology on its judges, all told through a subtle organizational lens. A snippet from the start of the review:

Court systems are large, complex, diverse, and resource-dependent organizations, a condition that shapes their character and behavior. It is surprising, then, how often court leaders fail to account for the organizational perspective in their decisionmaking. Amnon Reichman, Yair Sagy, and Shlomi Balaban illustrate this phenomenon, showing how the visionaries behind Legal-Net, Israel’s cloud-based judicial management system, were plagued by their failure to place its development in a broader organizational context.

Reichman and his colleagues trace the Israeli courts’ development of Legal-Net over two decades. Their research reveals a court system brimming with confidence that technology could be used to regulate judicial behavior, but insufficiently appreciative of the challenges of technological integration. The first version of Legal-Net was a flop: complicated and ambitious, it was a poor fit with existing court culture. A subsequent version better accounted for the court system’s unique character, but court leaders failed to anticipate how significantly its implementation would affect that character. In fact, the authors explain, the introduction of Legal-Net “heralded a tectonic shift in the judiciary’s work culture and work patterns,” as judges tailored their behavior toward the system’s incentives and away from their traditional roles. Today, it seems, the Israeli courts work for Legal-Net as much as Legal-Net works for them.

Please read the whole thing!

The intricacies of courthouse design

Law360 has a very interesting article about the design of courthouses, a task which must balance a number of overlapping and occasionally competing goals:

Conveying respect for the rule of law and the courthouse as the physical “home of the law” (reminiscent of Chief Justice Taft’s moniker of the Supreme Court building as the “Temple of Justice”);
Assuring access to justice for court users and observers;
Providing adequate working space for judges and court staff; and
Protecting the safety of everyone in the building.

The modern courthouse is simultaneously an office building, a processing station, a public space, a secular temple, a democratic icon, an entertainment complex, and a playing field. Capturing all of those needs in one building is a profound architectural challenge.

Some of the newer courthouses were designed with extra space and wiggle room to accommodate changing needs. I especially like the design of the federal courthouse in Boston (below), notwithstanding its questionable interior artwork. But older courthouses are increasingly bursting at the seams or in need of major retrofitting, and the funding may not be available.

Moakley courthouse

Interested readers should check out the wonderful, and coffee table-worthy, Representing Justice by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, which tracks the history of American courthouses and the evolving goals behind their design.

What is the right level of court system transparency?

Court transparency is essential, but it cannot be one-size-fits-all proposition. Here’s why.

Several recent articles in the popular press and academic literature have grappled with the issue of transparency. Professor Scott Dodson has written about the “open-courts norm” in the United States which, “accentuated by the First Amendment,” guarantees that criminal (and in most cases, civil) proceedings are open to the public. And, channeling Homer Simpson, Professor David Pozen has described government transparency “as the cause of, and solution to, a remarkable range of problems.” Outside the academic world, organizations such as Fix the Court are issuing their own transparency report cards to draw attention to the refusal of some courts (including the U.S. Supreme Court) to broadcast oral arguments.

These commentators are on to something important. As public organizations, courts are expected to be broadly transparent about their activities. But not all forms of court transparency are the same. Some types of transparency are necessary to the courts’ survival, while other types of transparency would actually undermine the courts’ operations. It is worth considering why.

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Judge Larsen on State Courts in a Federal System

Regular readers of this blog know that I believe Judge Joan Larsen, of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, to be a prime candidate to fill the next Supreme Court vacancy should another seat open up during the Trump Administration. Late last year, Judge Larsen delivered the Sumner Canary Memorial Lecture at Case Western Reserve Law School in Ohio, and that school’s law review has just published her remarks.

The lecture is a short and valuable exposition on the often nuanced relationship between state and federal courts–something Judge Larsen knows well. I highly recommend the entire piece to the reader. But a couple of points she made struck me as particularly interesting from an organizational perspective.

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Judicial elections in the #MeToo era

I am pleased to announce that my article, Judicial Recall and Retention in the #MeToo Era, has been published in the latest issue of Court Review. It is part of a symposium issue on the recall election of Judge Aaron Persky in California last June.

The article identifies strong similarities between the efforts to recall Judge Persky and later efforts to prevent the retention of Judge Michael Corey in Alaska and Justice Carol Corrigan in California. As I explain in the article, the parallels are troubling because recall elections and retention elections historically developed at different times and for different reasons. The utilization of recall tactics in retention elections is therefore a worrisome development.

Court Review is the official journal of the American Judges Association. I recommend the entire issue for anyone interested in the Persky saga and lessons that may be drawn from it.

IAALS releases report and recommendations on judicial discipline

The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) has released a new report entitled Recommendations for Judicial Discipline Systems. Authored by University of Arizona law professor Keith Swisher and Brookings Fellow Russell Wheeler, it is a careful and sober analysis of existing judicial discipline systems, with recommendations for improving the process in a way that protects judicial independence and integrity as well as public expectations about efficiency, fairness, and transparency.

Cribbing from the Preface:

Effective judicial discipline is an important part of a trusted and trustworthy court system. The public must know that judicial ethics and violations of the Code of Judicial Conduct are taken seriously. Absent that assurance, the system appears self-serving, protectionist, and even potentially corrupt. And it is not just the reality of the existence of effective systems that matters; it is also the appearance. A wholly effective system with no transparency and no public confidence will not suffice.

To explore the functioning of judicial conduct commissions, in March 2018, IAALS convened a 21-person group of commissioners, commission staff, judges, lawyers, and scholars (identified in Appendix A). They, along with IAALS Executive Director Rebecca Kourlis and a small number of IAALS staff, worked through the agenda in Appendix B. This Report draws on that Convening.

Rosen on Taft on judicial independence

Longtime readers of this blog know how much I have come to respect William Howard Taft as a Chief Justice: his tireless efforts to modernize and autonomize the federal judiciary transformed the Third Branch forever. Now, Jeffrey Rosen has written a short and masterful book on Taft, ostensibly focused on Taft’s Presidency, but delightfully cognizant of Taft’s lifelong judicial temperament and ambitions.

I shall have much more to say about Rosen’s book soon, but in the meantime I was delighted to see him blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy last week. The subject: what would William Howard Taft do about the political challenges of our day? The final installment, on Taft’s approach to judicial independence in the face of persistent populist attacks by prominent politicians (sound familiar?) is here.