Injustice On Appeal by Reynolds William L. Richman William M. & William L. Reynolds

Author:Reynolds, William L., Richman, William M. & William L. Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

12. Long-Range Plan for the Federal Courts

In an effort to generate a “more systematic capacity to anticipate broader societal changes and plan for more distant horizons,” the Report of the Federal Courts Study Committee recommended that the Judicial Conference of the United States engage in long-range planning.106 In response, the Judicial Conference created the Committee on Long Range Planning in 1990, staffed it with four appellate judges, three district judges, a bankruptcy judge, and a magistrate judge, and charged it to prepare a long-range plan for Judicial Conference approval. The Committee’s preparatory activities107 included: reviewing prior study reports; commissioning numerous research projects by its own staff, the Federal Judicial Center, and several independent federal courts scholars; conducting retreats at which invited judges, lawyers, and academics offered suggestions; preparing and circulating a draft report;108 and holding three public hearings on the draft.

The process culminated in a proposed draft, which was then referred to the Judicial Conference. Individual Conference members were authorized to request additional study of any recommendation resulting in about half of the total 101 recommendations being referred to appropriate Judicial Conference committees, with the remainder being adopted as proposed. The purpose of this phase was to achieve consensus within the Conference on the more controversial recommendations of the Long Range Plan. The resulting Committee studies and reports produced substantial change in or deletion of about a dozen recommendations and resulted in the adoption of the remainder by the Judicial Conference.109

After assessing the current state of the judiciary, the Report lays out two opposing apocalyptic visions of the future of the federal courts in 2020. In one vision, Congress has continued to heap business on the federal courts and authorized court growth to accommodate the increase. There are more than one thousand circuit judges split into at least twenty circuits arranged in two tiers. Because of these numbers, the appointment and confirmation process takes up to three years, and judges resign often because of the alienation caused by being “only a small cog in … a vast wheel of justice.” The Federal Reporter is now in its seventh series, and federal law has become “vaster and more incoherent than ever.”110

Equally hysterical is an opposite vision. Funding for staff, salaries, and courthouses has dried up because of overall pressures on the federal budget, yet Congress has continued heaping work on a federal judiciary capped at one thousand judges. Dockets lengthen to the point that litigants seek justice from private providers, and fewer and fewer qualified lawyers are willing to serve on the federal bench under such austere conditions.111

Those frightening visions of a besieged federal judiciary and the consensus-seeking, judge-dominated planning process combined to produce a document that emphasized the needs of the judges, as opposed to other stakeholders. This tendency is apparent in the Plan’s jurisdictional recommendations, some of which called for the legislative and executive branches of government to change their habits for the benefit of the courts. Thus the Plan deplored the increased burden on the courts resulting from

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