NCJ Number
83827
Date Published
1982
Length
15 pages
Annotation
An organizational analysis of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals suggests that circuit courts are individual discrete organizations in addition to being system components, and this should be considered in the development of judicial administration and resource allocation.
Abstract
James D. Thompson's 'Organizations in Action' (1967) provides a useful framework for understanding the court as an organization. According to Thompson, organizations have patterns of behavior. The nature of an organization is primarily determined by its core technology, the kind of work the organization does; however, the task environment, the environment within which the organization functions, is often unstable. To protect the organization's core technology from the vagaries of changing conditions, organizations obtain people or units, referred to by Thompson as boundary spanners, whose task is to mediate the effects of environmental turbulence. In the case of courts, the core technology consists of the types of decisionmaking the particular court normally does, viewed from the perspective of those in the organization. The task environment refers to the persons, conditions, and organizations that significantly affect the court's operation. Organization boundary spanners include the chief judge, circuit executive, the clerk's office, and the chief staff counsel or central legal staff. Data from the operation of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals suggest that circuit courts are discrete organizations as defined by Thompson. This indicates that more studies of the management problems of individual courts are needed. Fourteen notes and 30 references are provided.