More and more often Americans are turning to the courts to settle disputes which previously would have been settled privately or not at all. Consequently, the courts are becoming overloaded. Delays of years are not uncommon in bringing civil cases to trial. To deal with such delays, experts have proposed a variety of reforms. This research analyzes two books which address these issues: Raymond Nimmer's The Nature of System Change and Thomas Church's Justice Delayed.
Nimmer challenges five popular assumptions about the impact of reform of the courts. He believes that reforms are all too often attempted based on "assumptions" about judicial behavior which are inaccurate or which misstate or misperceive the process of change. Each assumption is challenged as tending to oversimplify and prepackage reform.
The first assumption challenged by Nimmer is "technocratic." Under this assumption, reformers often propose technological changes such as "the newest computer or information system." Although reformers assume that computerized systems will benefit the courts, their assumption frequently misperceives that manual processing is simply not the cause of the problem. Nimmer also challenges the assumption that more "resources" will solve the problems of the courts. This assumption postulates that judicial problems will disappear by adding courtrooms, clerks, judges or attorneys. Unfortunately, it lacks both specificity and empirical support and cannot be evaluated intelligently as a result. Third, Nimmer believes that the so-called "rule-obedience" assumption is inaccurate. Reformers often assume that a mere change in formal legal rules will produce a change in the behavior of the courts. Although some relationship between rules and behavior does exist, this assumption fails to consider that discretion plays a large role in the system and that the relationship between the implementation of rules and modification of b...