Court Management: The Judge’s Role and Responsibility

Abstract

How do we prepare for change in our courts? How do we develop a long-range plan? These are questions that courts and judges need to answer in order to avoid being overwhelmed by our changing society. Georgetown University in 1989 surveyed a select group of court experts on their opinions about what courts needed to do to prepare for change. As part of that survey, those experts were asked, among other things, what must be done by the courts to deal with those societal and court-related trends that will affect the courts over the next 30 years. The experts recommended the following courses of action, which the surveyors did not list in any order of priority: 1. improve the access to the judicial system; 2. divert classes of disputes to reduce docket pressures; 3. emphasize judicial management of dispute resolution; 4. re-emphasize the courts' service ethos; 5. provide new impetus for judicial education; 6. expand the legal profession's ability to help clients; 7. exemplify equal opportunity in the process of achieving equal justice; 8. reorganize to handle scientifically-intensive, technically-complex cases; 9. provide greater authority for courts to innovate; 10. generate public policy promoting dispute resolution; 11. create new judicial and legislative partnerships; and 12. modernize the courts. Now my own list of things the courts must do differs somewhat from the foregoing, and I suspect that the views of readers of The Judges' Journal would differ as well. In fact, when Georgetown surveyed other groups, including judges attending a seminar at the National Judicial College, they got different results. This is not surprising, because as individuals we all tend to have different opinions on most subjects. And these differences are accentuated when we speculate as to