SEEING "THE COURTS": MANAGERIAL JUDGES, EMPTY COURTROOMS, CHAOTIC COURTHOUSES, AND JUDICIAL LEGITIMACY FROM THE 1980S TO THE 2020S
Authors: Resnik Judith 
Published: February 2025

From some perspectives, litigation looks vibrant, with frontpage coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court's reconsideration of its precedents and high-profile civil and criminal lawsuits against government officials. Moreover, since the 1980s, the federal judiciary has had an ambitious building program producing dozens of courthouses designed to exemplify the "solemnity, stability, integrity, rigor, and fairness " of adjudication. Such edifices underscore courts ' place in narrations of the United States. Yet the challenges of legitimating government authority, of which judicial actions are a part, have become all the more acute since Managerial Judges was published forty years ago. The world of ordinary litigation is troubled and shrinking, and the disjuncture between judges ' stated goals and their practices has become vivid. Aside from a few aggregations of tens of thousands of cases in "mega" multidistrict litigations (MDLs), filings in the federal courts have flattened and declined to about 240,000 civil cases per year. At both trial and appellate levels, significant percentages of litigants proceed without lawyers; about one-quarter of civil filings and about half of the appeals come from individuals representing themselves. Most circuits have embraced norms of limiting oral arguments and of issuing eighty-five percent of their decisions as non-precedential rulings. Those practices, rendering their work less visible, parallel the lack of transparency of the many managerial decisions at the trial level, where hours on the bench are down to about 320 per year and fewer than one of 100 civil lawsuits ends with a trial All the while, federal courts remain relatively rich in resources and staff as compared to both state and tribal courts and to agencies. Even as filings likewise have fallen, state courts continue to have tens of millions more cases and larger segments of their dockets in which lawyerless litigants are the norm. Many judges are ill-equipped to respond to disputants with limited resources, often in family conflicts or as debtors and tenants who face resourced adversaries. Further, as the focus shifts to web-based resolution mechanisms, little attention is paid to its privatizing features. Providers of online dispute resolution (ODR) have not seen enabling public access as part of the packet of services to promote. Thus, courtroom-based adjudication is becoming increasingly rare. One possibility is that this form of statecraft is failing and the time has come to abandon its aspirations. Yet, as an heir to a political tradition grounded in the due process ideology of governments obligated to make decisions that are not arbitrary, I am not willing to give up the public service of adjudication and on courts as one of many venues to put into practice commitments of equal treatment. To legitimate decisions, judges need to preside over cases in which litigants are able to provide adequate information. This article analyzes the federal judiciary's function as an adjudicatory institution and as an "agency" with its own programmatic agendas. During the last few decades, the federal judiciary has successfully lobbied Congress to create and finance a host of projects, including authorizing judges to centralize cases through multidistrict litigation, to select and appoint adjunct magistrate and bankruptcy judges, and to oversee the design of dozens of new courthouses. Since the 1990s, the federal judiciary has also gathered statistics on and repeatedly raised concerns about the number of self-represented litigants. Yet the judiciary has not generated structural responses, such as a national database on the many district court "pro se " projects and new mechanisms to enlist lawyering and other resources, to enable judges to make principled decisions in those cases. Likewise, while the docket is heavily dependent on the cross-litigant subsidies generated through class actions and MDLs, judges have not crafted methods to mobilize the lawyering resources in those configurations to support litigants within or to shape a robust method of overseeing implementation of the resolutions reached. To date, the federal judiciary has not instituted a mechanism to buffer against allocating adjudicatory resources largely based on litigants' economic wherewithal. Moreover, the federal judiciary, entwined with state and tribal court adjudication, has not joined its counterparts in pressing Congress to provide new streams of funding for all kinds of courts and the people using them. Navigating the political economy of courts producing a crisis of legitimacy requires reorienting the "process due" by revising statutes, doctrine, practices, and rules to respond to an eclectic set of claimants seeking to be heard. "Management" of the people in court does not suffice.