Justice Works: Workloads, Resources, and the Legitimacy of American Trial Courts

• In Event: Law, Courts, and the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Abstract

Do judges' working conditions have downstream consequences for how citizens evaluate trial court systems? It is often said that heavy caseload burdens make it more difficult for the legal process to produce just and timely results. In organizational terms, overburdening courts lowers their capacity, or their ability to effectuate their desired ends. On the other hand, studies of bureaucracy and public administration consistently observe that institutions with more resources possess greater capacity. Defining trial court ends as processing more cases more efficiently while at the same time processing them fairly, this paper articulates a resource-capacity theory of trial court outputs, where the size of the court workload acts as a constraint on capacity. The thoery operates in two stages, the first stage connective caseloads and court resources to court efficiency and procedural justice, and the second linking court outputs to legitimacy, or more specifcally to diffuse support that the court system enjoys among the citizenry. Leveraging national survey data on public perceptions of the courts as well as system-level data on caseloads, case dispositions, budgets, staff, and other factors, I evaluate a series of longitudinal and cross-sectional models. If conclude that workloads and resources predict some court outputs, but not always in the way expected.

Author

• Sean Craig, University of Pittsburgh