Court Culture Resource Guide

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Resource Guide

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Both court culture and performance are complex because each one is an attempt to provide a comprehensive look at the full range of court activities. Just as court culture is an effort to define the source of virtually all aspects of criminal and civil court operations, performance is a method to define and assess the most important actions that a court can take. This topic attempts to address the nature and significance of each separate idea, and then attempts to synthesize and suggest how the two might be unified more closely in the future.

Links to related online resources are listed below. Non-digitized publications may be borrowed from the NCSC Library; call numbers are provided.

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Burke, Hon. Kevin, and Frank Broccolina. Another View of Local Legal Culture: More Than Court Culture. (Winter 2005). Court Manager Volume 20, number. 4: Page 29 This article is a rebuttal to the article by Geoff Gallas, "Local Legal Culture: More Than Court Culture." The authors argue that court culture has a significant impact on case-processing times, and courts should examine their court culture to become more effective.

Ostrom, Brian, Roger Hanson, and Matthew Kleiman. Caseload Highlights: Examining Court Culture. (2005). Research Division.

This issue of Caseload Highlights demonstrates how the theory and measurement of court culture provides a coherent framework and a concrete basis to describe the ways courts conduct business and how their cultural work orientations are related to variations in performance.

Ostrom, Brian, Roger Hanson, Charles Ostrom, and Matthew Kleiman. Court Cultures and their Consequences. (Spring 2005). Court Manager Volume 20, Number 1. This article talks about how court culture is defined as the expectations and beliefs judges and court administrators have about the way work gets done.

Ostrom, Brian Efficiency, Timeliness and Quality: A New Perspective from Nine State Criminal Trial Courts. (June 2000). National Institute of Justice Timeliness and the quality of justice are not mutually exclusive either in theory or in fact. Expeditious criminal case resolution is found to be associated with court systems in which the conditions also promote effective advocacy. Because effective advocacy underlies due process and equal protection of the law, it is an integral aspect of the broader concept of quality case processing. The evidence from this study suggests that well-performing courts should be expected to excel in terms of both timeliness and quality.

Church, Thomas.et al. Justice Delayed: The Pace of Litigation in Urban Trial Courts. (1978). NCSC with the National Conference of Metropolitan Courts.

Report examines the pace of civil and criminal litigation in state trial courts of general jurisdiction.

Gallas, Geoff. Local Legal Culture: More Than Court Culture. (Winter 2005). Court Manager Volume 20, Number 4, Page 23 This article begins with the historical development of the concept of “local legal culture" and how its limitations led to the development of the broader concept of “court culture.”

Church, Thomas, Jo-Lynne Lee, Teresa Tan, Alan Carlson and Virgina McConnell. Pretrial Delay: A Review and Bibliography. (1978).

This is a "critical review of extensive literature dealing with the pervasive and long-standing problem of pretrial delay in American trial courts" . . . written as a preliminary stage in a major research and demonstration project on trial court delay.

Ostrom, Brian J. et al. Trial Courts as Organizations. (2007). Chicago: Temple University Press In this book, the authors examine how courts operate, what characteristics they may display, and how they function as a unit to preserve judicial independence, strengthen organizational leadership, and influence court performance.