Trial Courts as Organizations

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Brian J Ostrom, Charles W Ostrom, Jr., Roger A Hanson and Matthew Kleiman

"I think that this is the most innovative study of trial courts in the past ten or fifteen years. Substantively, the authors combine trial court scholarship and in particular the conceptions of court workgroups, culture and context with business research that directs attention to private sector organization and management. This combination is truly path-breaking."
—Susette Talarico, Albert Berry Saye Professor of American Government and Constitutional Law and Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science Emerita, University of Georgia

Court administrators and judges have long acknowledged that culture plays an important role in the function of trial courts. Trial Courts as Organizations provides a comprehensive framework for understanding this organizational culture, along with a set of steps and tools to assess and measure the current and preferred culture.

The authors examine how courts operate, what characteristics they may display, and how they function as a unit to preserve judicial independence, strengthen organizational leadership, and influence court performance. They identify four different types of institutional cultures using a systematic analysis of alternative values on how work is done. Each culture is shown to have its own strengths and weaknesses in achieving values, such as timely case resolution, access to court services, and procedural justice. Accordingly, the authors find judges and administrators prefer a definite pattern of different cultures, called a "mosaic," to guide how their courts operate in the future.

Reviews

"A wonderful-and welcome-addition to the literature. To say that political scientists have failed to devote sustained attention state trial courts is to way understate the case. If scholarship was commensurate with caseloads, nine out of every ten studies would focus on these arenas, and not the U.S. Supreme Court or even the lower federal courts-as they currently do. Not only does Trial Courts as Organizations go some distance toward remedying this imbalance, it also does the really hard work of building a foundation for future scholarship. A very impressive achievement indeed."
—Lee Epstein Beatrice Kuhn Professor of Law, Northwestern University School of Law

"The study adds significantly to the scanty body of empirical research on courts."
—Choice

"Ostrom and his colleagues have produced an important contribution on the topic of state trial courts….The book is well written and argued, and it presents original empirical evidence. I think anyone who reads the book will find it an interesting and important contribution to the work on trial courts in particular, as well as to the notion that cultural variation across courts has consequences for court performance and output."
—Perspectives on Politics

Preface

Chapter 1 - Introduction
Chapter 2 - A Framework for Court Culture
Chapter 3 - Measuring Court Culture
Chapter 4 - Elaborating the Culture Types
Chapter 5 - Consequences of Culture
Chapter 6 - Preferences for Court Culture
Chapter 7 - Conclusion and Implications

About the Author(s)

Brian J. Ostrom is Principal Research Consultant at the National Center for State Courts.
Charles W. Ostrom, Jr. is Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.
Roger A. Hanson is an Adjunct Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Colorado.
Matthew Kleiman is a Senior Court Research Associate at the National Center for State Courts.

Subject Categories

Law and Criminology
Sociology
Political Science and Public Policy