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Civil Justice Research and Civil Justice Reform

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Maurice Rosenberg
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Extract

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If the law's traditional road to reform were the only path available, we would still be trying to improve the administration of justice by theorizing and “reasoning” our way to betterment. That is no longer the only way. Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of systematically gathered data to identify problems and devise responses to aid the justice system. This new path takes the investigator into the field rather than into the library, relying on the skills of the social scientist and statistician as well as those of the legal thinker.

Type
Part One-Background: The Need for Research on Civil Courts
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 15 , Issue 3-4: Special Issue on Dispute Processing and Civil Litigation , 1981 , pp. 473 - 483
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

Since this article was drafted in January, 1981, the Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice has been merged into a new unit in the Department of Justice, the Office for Legal Policy. Responsibility for the CLRP project was transferred to the National Institute of Justice.

**

Formerly Assistant Attorney General, U. S. Department of Justice, Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice. The help of Mae Kuykendall, formerly of the Office's Federal Justice Research Program, was substantial and entirely indispensable. I acknowledge her contributions with much appreciation.

References

1 Created by the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act and curtailed by the 1979 Justice System Improvement Act (PL 96-157).

2 This is an estimate for 49 states using an upper limit of 95 percent of the confidence interval.

3 The Council on the Role of Courts is a self-constituted group that has functioned with financial and staff support from the Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice. It began meeting in July, 1978, to analyze and evaluate the role of courts in the United States, with the aim of producing findings and recommendations that will inform legislators who must decide on channeling disputes to courts or providing alternative mechanisms.

For references cited in this article, see p. 883.