United States: So Many States, So Many Reforms

Abstract

There are fifty-one civil justice systems in the United States: There is one system con ducted by the federal government and one conducted by each of the fifty states. As a result, it is misleading to talk about a single civil system in the United States because of the different substantive laws, legal doctrines, and court procedures extant among the fifty states and the federal government. For almost all individuals in the United States, their experience with civil justice is likely to be in the state courts. The number of cases filed in the state courts far exceeds the number filed in the federal system. For example, each of the general jurisdiction trial courts in California, Florida, New Jersey, and New York resolve more tort, contract, and real property cases than the number of civil cases resolved in the entire federal trial court system. Hence, the states are where the action is. The most successful civil justice court reform during the past two decades has been the introduction of case management. State trial courts, and to a lesser degree, appellate courts, have implemented procedures that provide information on and control over the processing of cases. At the trial court level, the monitoring of cases is supported by auto mated case-tracking systems that are under the supervision of court administrators and clerks of court. For this reasons, Jeremy Bentham's notion of judge and company refers not only to the trial court judge, his or her bailiff, law clerk, and secretary but also to one or more administrators, depending on the size of the bench. At the appellate level, the major organizational development in the past twenty years has been procedural differentiation. To achieve greater efficiency, and to allow judges to spend more time on complex cases, state appellate courts have modified steps in the traditional appellate process (e.g., limited the length of briefs, placed limitations on oral argument, or decided cases with summary dispositions rather than full-written, signed opinions). Civil justice in the United States will never be perfect. Why? Despite the benefits of case management and procedural differentiation, civil cases are generally private dis putes involving conflicting economic interests. Thus, the best that courts can hope to achieve is the resolution of disputes in a manner that meets their standards of timeliness and quality.