Rise of Judicial Management in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955-2000This is the first book-length study of a federal district court to analyze the revolutionary changes in its mission, structure, policies, and procedures over the past four decades. As Steven Harmon Wilson chronicles the court's attempts to keep pace with an expanding, diversifying caseload, he situates those efforts within the social, cultural, and political expectations that have prompted the increase in judicial seats from four in 1955 to the current nineteen. Federal judges have progressed from being simply referees of legal disputes to managers of expanding courts, dockets, and staffs, says Wilson. The Southern District of Texas offers an especially instructive model by which to study this transformation. Not only does it contain a varied population of Hispanics, African Americans, and whites, but its jurisdiction includes an international border and some of the busiest seaports in the United States. Wilson identifies three areas of judicial management in which the shift has most clearly manifested itself. Through docket and case management judges have attempted to rationalize the flow of work through the litigation process. Lastly, and most controversially, judges have sought to bring "constitutionally flawed" institutions into compliance through "structural reform" rulings in areas such as housing, education, employment, and voting. Wilson draws on sources ranging from judicial biography and oral-history interviews to case files, published opinions, and administrative memoranda. Blending legal history with social science, this important new study ponders the changing meaning of federal judgeship as it shows how judicial management has both helped and hindered the resolution of legal conflicts and the protection of civil rights. |
From inside the book
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... appeal, but magistrates increasingly have acted as “gatekeepers” of a sort by sifting the facts and sharpening legal issues that may only later come before a federal district judge. There are now more than a dozen magistrates in the ...
... appealed Kennerly's decision, in the apparent hope that Sweatt had set a new standard. The Fifth Circuit's response to this appeal demonstrated that, even after the landmark ruling on graduate education, Inc. Fund lawyers had miles to ...
... appealed Estes' ruling to the Fifth Circuit. A three-judge panel, including two Texans, Chief Circuit Judge Hutcheson and Circuit Judge John R. Brown, and Circuit Judge Richard T. Rives of Alabama, heard the appeal and reversed Estes ...
... Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, on the state's appeal, upheld the district judge's decision for the plaintiff Mexican Americans in Westminster School District v. Mendez. The circuit judges were decidedly less critical than the district ...
... appeal to the privileges that attached to whiteness. The result was a balancing act, a careful straddling of the Jim ... appealed on the grounds that there were no Mexican American grand jury commissioners or grand jurors in the county ...
Contents
1 | |
11 | |
Legislation Litigation and Judicial Economy | 50 |
The Rules and Exceptions of Border Justice | 93 |
Managing Our Federalism in the Southern District | 140 |
Judicial Management of Triethnic Integration | 189 |
Federal Criminal Justice on Trial in the 1970s | 233 |
Adjuncts and the Oversight of Corporate Misconduct | 281 |
Masters Magistrates and Managerial Judges | 327 |
Just Speedy and Inexpensive Resolutions | 355 |
Notes | 359 |
Selected Bibliography | 521 |
Index | 547 |