Vol. 5, No. 7 (July, 1995) pp. 190-191
COURT REFORM AND JUDICIAL LEADERSHIP by Paul B. Wice. Westport,
CT: Praeger, 1995. 212 pp. Cloth $57.95.
Reviewed by Herbert Jacob (Northwestern University)
Very few studies focus on the world and life of trial judges;
they still remain largely a mystery to outsiders. COURT REFORM
AND JUDICIAL LEADERSHIP removes a small piece of the veil. It
describes the efforts of a New Jersey trial judge, George Nicola,
to improve the administration of justice in his trial court over
a period of 20 years. Nicola's first focused on handling juvenile
cases so that those youth who might be deterred from a criminal
career were assisted while those who were already enmeshed in it
would be swiftly punished. When Judge Nicola moved to adult
criminal court, he established several programs to speed
adjudication of cases including what Wice calls
"verticalized case management," holding court in the
jail in order to minimize the expense of moving prisoners to the
distant court house, and sentencing those convicted at the same
time as they pleaded guilty. Several years later, Judge Nicola
established one of the early "drug court" programs
which provided separate tracks for treating addicts and for
imposing swift and severe punishment for those deemed ineligible
for treatment.
Wice frames his book with two distinct theoretical perspectives.
The first is what he calls the bureaucratic setting of the court
and in the first chapter he spends considerable space reviewing
some of the literature on courts as organizations and on
bureaucracy in general. I will return to this below. The second
framing perspective is a focus on personal characteristics and
leadership styles that may be associated with successful
innovations. Wice also reviews some of this considerable
literature and then consistently returns to this theme in the
remainder of the book.
For Wice, Judge Nicola's success hinged on his ability to
conceptualize the change process and plan the steps required to
achieve reform, to enlist the collaboration of those who occupied
key positions in the social and organizational structure
involved, to recruit appropriate staff, to inspire hard work, and
to evaluate and modify the program once it had begun. Wice paints
a very flattering portrait of Judge Nicola and finds that he
meets all those standards. It is not, however, a very nuanced or
deep psychological portrait; it resembles an official account of
the judge's accomplishments more than a clinical explanation of
Nicola's personal and public struggles to achieve his goals. The
book is written in Wice's words; Nicola's voice rarely breaks
through either in quotations from interviews or from the written
record.
Although Wice's focus on a trial judge is welcome, his book is
disappointing in several important aspects. His first framing
perspective -- courts as bureaucracies that are difficult to
change -- is, I believe misplaced. He quotes Robert Merton in
defining what he means by bureaucracy: "rules, disciplines,
a graded career" (p. 14), without exploring whether such
elements in fact characterize trial courts. In my experience,
they do not. Trial courts are surely organizations but they have
distinctive features which need to be recognized in any account
of their work. They do not ordinarily recruit their judges;
Page 191
they have little control over their workloads; they often have
only an attenuated hierarchy; they can offer few incentives to
elicit high productivity and can threaten few sanctions to
discipline laggards. They exist in many varieties. Moreover, Wice
neglects some of the most powerful studies of trial courts,
especially those published in recent years by James Eisenstein,
Peter Nardulli, and Roy B. Flemming even though they studied
criminal courts of comparable size to the New Jersey court where
Judge Nicola presided.
Despite his interest in bureaucracy, Wice provides us very little
information about the organizational context in which Judge
Nicola worked. Several times in the book, Wice mentions the
Administrative Office of the Courts in New Jersey without
describing its very considerable powers. Indeed, Judge Nicola's
last reform, the drug court, was undone by the AOC. Wice simply
reports the results without exploring the dynamics of that power
struggle. Likewise, Wice tells us very little about the
organization of the Middlesex Superior Court. We learn near the
end of the book (p. 173) that it has 20 judges, one-third of whom
work on criminal matters. In the epilogue, we find that it is
possible for judges to be transferred to other counties. Wice
tells us little about the politics of obtaining a judgeship,
securing desirable assignments, and assuring reappointment to the
bench at the end of a judge's term. We learn little about the
kind of hierarchy that exists and what assistance or resistance
it provides for judges who, like Nicola, seek to innovate. We do
not know how interactions with other judges support or inhibit a
judge like Nicola.
COURT REFORM AND JUDICIAL LEADERSHIP demonstrates that there are
many important questions that need to be researched before we can
claim to understand how trial courts operate in the United
States. Like others before him, Paul Wice shows that such courts
can be penetrated, and in his case apparently without large
research funding. It is a subject still waiting to be fully
explored.
References:
Eisenstein, James, Roy B. Flemming and Peter Nardulli. 1987. THE
CONTOURS OF JUSTICE: COMMUNITIES AND THEIR COURTS. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co.
Flemming, Roy B., Peter F. Nardulli and James Eisenstein. 1992.
THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE: POLITICS AND WORK IN CRIMINAL COURT
COMMUNITIES. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Peter F. Nardulli, Roy B. Flemming and James Eisenstein. 1988.
THE TENOR OF JUSTICE. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Copyright 1995