| dc.description.abstract |
Hard times can inspire new ways of thinking about old problems. State courts today have ample reasons for questioning the continued viability of traditional approaches to organizing their work and to providing leadership. This paper proposes a set of principles for governing state court systems that is intended to begin a dialogue about how court governance can best be enhanced to meet current and future challenges. Governance is defined as “the means by which an activity or ensemble of activities is controlled or directed, such that it delivers an acceptable range of outcomes according to some established social standard” (Hirst, 2000:24).The principles outlined in this paper were developed by re-examining what courts, as institutions, need to do internally to meet their responsibilities. This is in contrast to much of the current writing about the future of court governance, which tends to focus on ways in which the state courts can improve their relationship with the other branches of government.The section that follows sets the stage by describing the ways in which state court systems currently are structured. The manner in which state court systems are organized presents problems for effective court governance. The next section discusses the distinctive cultural problems associated with governing courts as opposed to other parts of state government. Existing discussions of court governance are insufficiently at- tentive to this cultural dimension. Eleven principles of court governance are then presented, with explana- tory commentary, to respond to the challenges pre- sented by both court structure and court culture. |
