Overview and Introduction to the Special Issue

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functions, and programs of courts as organizations. Judicial administration casts a wider net to encompass topics bearing on fundamentals of judicial system design that extend well into the realm of forthright value choices. Arguments favoring one scheme for selecting judges over another scheme would typify such obviously value-laden issues. So would questions like the appropriate size and scope of juris dictions, whether the United States should establish a National Court of Appeals, whether trial courts ought to be 'unified,' and whether judges ought to be independent or accountable. Questions like these can be stirring enough that U.S. Senators on one hand, and thoughtful college undergraduates on the other hand, can be energized by them. Taken at face value, contributors to this special issue of the Journal sound themes that arise from the realm of court management. Outsiders are unlikely to find them gripping. Instead, as landscape architects, preschool directors, or university deans might constitute the principal audiences for dissections of their respective occupations, court administrators and the research and education specialists who serve them are the principal audience for this collection. They constitute the class most likely to be interested in both the history and the trajectory of the profession, for their professional lives are framed within it. Yet we think that the issues found in these pages connect to patterns that range well beyond the everyday, and bear meanings that are parts of larger motifs. Simply, questions designed to elicit a particular understanding of court managers must reflect the place of those professionals within our world - and ineluctably, reflect as well something about the nature of world. This is not quite to say, Senators, undergraduates, lend me your ears! It is more to say, to the stewards