¹ “Organizational” research on courts has, by and large, merged work from judicial process with that of small-group decisionmaking; the court is often defined as the judge and his/her “team,” which may include lawyers and other professional actors of the courtroom. Thus, Jacob has written, “[w]hat the organizational model does best perhaps is to call attention to the interactional elements of trial court proceedings” where he defines trial court as “composed not just of the judge and clerks who are located in the courtroom and its adjacent chambers. Other important members of the work group, especially the attorneys who practice there, move in and out of the courtroom” (1983b: 414). This definition of the court as an organization still reifies a division between legal-judicial, nonjudicial, and management personnel so that those who operate on the legal-judicial side of the fence remain the focus of investigation.

As we document in our work, we take the whole court and its jurisdictional environment as the unit of analysis. For a further discussion, see pp. 1405-8 infra.

² For example, Friedman and Percival find that “dispute settlement in the courts is declining” and that “[i]n general, the trial courts today perform routine administration” (1976a: 296). Reflecting on the implications of these findings the authors write: “[a]pparently, litigation is not worthwhile for the potential litigant; it is too costly, in other words” (ibid., p. 298).

³ The discussion that follows is based on an extensive study undertaken with Wolf Heydebrand the results of which will be published as Rationalizing Justice: The Political Economy of Federal District Courts (1990).

⁴ Of course, carried to its logical extension, each tradition has the potential to undermine or expose the limitations of the other and thereby reveal, in turn, the limits of the state's legitimacy (Wolfe, 1977).

⁵ Some scholars describe this as a politics of bureaucratization; we prefer, however, to distinguish between rationalization and bureaucratization. That is, processes may be rationalized without necessarily being bureaucratized (see Stinchcombe, 1959). The classical definition of bureaucracy is borrowed from Weber (1967), where he defines this type of organization as one that is characterized by impersonality, formal rules, hierarchy, official positions, and expertise; as I will discuss later in this article, courts have become systematized without turning to bureaucratic strategies.

⁶ Methodologically two traditions of organizational analysis guided investigation: interorganizational and comparative analysis of organizations. An interorganizational approach focuses on the examination of an organization's response to various environmental pressures, such as fluctuations in the economy or population shifts. Drawing on our general observation that the courts are caught in a series of structural contradictions, we were especially concerned to embed the place of the third branch in the context of emerging state practices. Yet, we were equally concerned to employ a comparative approach which takes as its starting point the observation that it is helpful to examine work relations across similar types of organizations (e.g., to compare professional organizations such as courts, hospitals, or universities) and asks the researcher to take seriously the possibility that practices are not necessarily unique to the setting under investigation.

⁷ We would include work that looks at the judge as the court, as well as more recent work that examines the judge and a “courtroom team.” For a further discussion, see note 1 supra.

⁸ Briefly, we developed indicators of these environmental variables by aggregating data collected by county from the U.S. Bureau of the Census to the level of U.S. federal districts. For example, we selected number of manufacturers with one hundred or more employees as one indicator of economic activity; when aggregated, this indicator reported the number of manufacturers with one hundred or more employees within a U.S. federal district. Further, each cluster of variables is represented by multiple indicators; thus, economic variables included manufacturers, retail and wholesale establishments, retail and wholesale trade, number of mergers (collected from the U.S. Conference Board), and white-collar workers by U.S. federal district. A much more extensive discussion of the methodology is contained in Heydebrand and Seron (1990: Appendix A).

⁹ Task structure describes the assignment of responsibilities within a given organization and may generally be measured in terms of volume (sheer number), variability (variation in level of demand for service), and complexity (the number of different subtasks and the degree of skill required to execute the task). In this study, the court's caseload is the indicator used to measure the organization's task structure. For a further discussion of the organizational literature, see Hall (1987).

¹⁰ For example, the number and composition of civil cases in the federal system (e.g., U.S. versus private matters, or civil rights versus labor versus personal injury cases) are a function of the expanding demands on the state to regulate populist democratic demands to extend civil rights and civil liberties, as well as more traditional expectations to resolve diversity matters (see, e.g. Friendly, 1973); the impact of these social forces on a specific court may, however, vary considerably.

The logic of this relationship suggests, of course, one major set of hypotheses of this study: that the task structure of the federal district court is a function of the relations of environmental variables. To foreshadow a later point, our findings show that the presence of the governmental sector is the primary variable in an explanation of most categories of civil cases.

¹¹ Again, heteronomous is a term that is relatively common to the organizational literature and describes an organization that is organizationally dependent; in this sense, it may be contrasted with a relatively autonomous organization, such as a business firm which, for example, writes its own budget. For a further discussion, see Heydebrand (1973).

¹² This includes, of course, the budgets of courts as noted in point 2 above.

¹³ The types of cases that enter the court should be distinguished from the court's rules of operation. Since 1934 the Supreme Court has had the authority to write its own rules; while it is a rather common practice for most organizations to prepare their own internal operating procedures, this was a controversial change in the organization of the courts. (For a further discussion of a history of the Rules Enabling Act, see Burbank (1982).) Again, the advantages of a more comparative approach to the study of organizations is illustrated by this point because one is forced, at the very least, to note that the court's attempt to move rulemaking into the judicial branch reflects a general bent toward the rationalization of public services.

¹⁴ In keeping with the tradition of organizational research, we distinguish between a bureaucratic and a professional organization. (For a definition of a bureaucracy, see note 5 supra.) To the extent that a bureaucratic organization relies upon expertise (i.e., formally certified knowledge), it is not necessarily incompatible with professional organization (see, e.g., Hall, 1968). It is, however, also the case that there is an inherent tension between management's concern to insure efficiency and professionals' concern to control their own work (see, e.g., Freidson, 1986).

¹⁵ From the standpoint of litigation strategy one might argue that simply filing a case is a court action, but we are conceptualizing this from the standpoint of the organization of the court. A pretrial disposition is reported when the court intervenes in the case, but the case is concluded short of trial. A no action disposition is reported when the case terminates short of formal court intervention.

¹⁶ To supplement and to enrich this model, we also examined trends in the courts' caseload, resources, and output since the turn of the century. Further, we analyzed systematically the debates over court reform and modernization of the courts beginning in 1789 to contextualize and to specify the meaning and definition of our quantitative variables. Finally, one of the researchers explored the emergence and role of U.S. magistrates through participant observation and extensive open-ended interviews with judicial and court personnel across a variety of courts. Thus, following the methodological concept of triangulation (Denzin, 1970), we have relied on multivariate analysis, content analysis of historical documents, and participant observation of court practices to check, and balance, the shortcomings inherent in each of these methodologies.

¹⁷ Case filings were standardized using the population aged eighteen years and over. For a further discussion of this decision, see Heydebrand and Seron (1987).

¹⁸ This helps explain why it is so unfeasible for courts to bureaucratize in the classical sense of this term. That is, a necessary precondition for bureaucratization is the routinization of tasks into a set of predictable problems; our findings suggest, however, that federal district courts' tasks do not meet this important precondition. Of course, some categories of cases are more routine (e.g., social security) than others (e.g., new areas of patents or civil rights); but, on balance, nonroutine cases remain an important element of federal district court filings. Thus, courts have become more rational organizations, but the form of this change is not bureaucratic (see Stinchcombe, 1959, 1965). See note 5 supra.

¹⁹ This point distinguishes our research from much of the work that looks at increases or decreases in disputing as indicative of a crisis. Empirical research to explore the so-called litigation explosion has revealed that when changes in population are taken into account, for state courts at least, on balance there has not been an increase in court filings (see Krislov, 1986). This finding is not true for federal courts.

²⁰ Anecdotal studies of law clerks suggest that their work has changed. Once, it appears, most of their work was limited to the drafting of opinions for review and rewriting by judges. Today, it is not unusual for clerks to screen cases.

²¹ In developing this picture, I am not suggesting that all cases were, in fact, decided within these guidelines; indeed, the empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

²² This development of a more rationalized forms of administration is, of course, brilliantly captured by Weber.

²³ Note that this is not to suggest that the shift to informalism, management, and/or delegation is an inherently negative development. For a further discussion of this point, see Heydebrand and Seron (1990, chs. 1 and 8).

²⁴ Of course, this push toward rationalization has the potential to backfire—precisely because of the political traditions that are associated with this institution. For a further discussion, see Heydebrand and Seron (1990: ch. 8).