District Court Administrators

District Court Administrators in the United States

Introduction to District Court Administrators (State statute topic)

Courts and Administrative Law

As much as the connections between elected officials and administrators have been emphasized in administrative law, the relationship between courts and administrators has figured still more prominently in the field. Even when administrative procedures are created through legislation, the enforcement of such procedures often remains with judicial institutions.

Courts have also imposed their own additional procedures on agencies based on constitutional and sometimes common law principles. As with democratic issues, scholarly attention to the role of the courts has both prescriptive and positive aspects.

The main prescriptive focus has been on the degree to which courts should defer to the decisions made by administrative agencies. Much doctrinal analysis in administrative law acknowledges that administrative agencies’ capacity for making technical and policy judgments usually exceeds that possessed by courts.

Even in legal systems with specialized administrative courts, agency staff often possess greater policy expertise than judges, not to mention that administrators are probably more democratically accountable than tenured judges. These considerations have long weighed in favor of judicial deference to administrative agencies. On the other hand, it is generally accepted that some credible oversight by the courts bolsters agencies’ compliance with administrative law and may improve their overall performance. The prescriptive challenge therefore has been to identify the appropriate strategies for courts to take in overseeing agency decision-making.

This challenge typically has required choosing a goal for judicial intervention, a choice sometimes characterized as one between sound technical analysis or an open, pluralist decision-making process (Shapiro 1988). Courts can defer to an agency’s policy judgment, simply ensuring that the agency followed transparent procedures. Or courts can take a careful look at the agency’s decision to see that it was based on a thorough analysis of all relevant issues. The latter approach is sometimes referred to as ‘hard look’ review, as it calls for judges to probe carefully into the agency’s reasoning. Courts also face a choice about whether to defer to agencies’ interpretations of their own governing legislation instead of imposing judicial interpretations on the agencies. Prescriptive scholarship in administrative law seeks to provide principled guidance to the judges who confront these choices.

Judicial decisions are influenced in part by legal principles. Empirical research has shown, for example, that after the US Supreme Court decided that agencies’ statutory interpretations deserved judicial deference, lower courts made a significant shift in favor of deferring to agency interpretations (Schuck and Elliott 1990). Nevertheless, just as administrators themselves possess residual discretion, so too do judges possess discretion in deciding how deferential to be. Other empirical research suggests that in administrative law, as in other areas of law, political ideology also helps explain certain patterns of judicial decision-making (Revesz 1997).

In addition to empirical research on judicial decision-making, the field of administrative law has
been concerned centrally with the impact of judicial review on agency decision-making. Normative arguments about judicial review typically depend on empirical assumptions about the effects courts have on the behavior of administrative agencies. Indeed, most legal scholarship in administrative law builds on the premise that judicial review, if employed properly, can improve governance (Sunstein 1990, Edley 1990). The effects often attributed to judicial review include making agencies more observant of legislative mandates, increasing the analytic quality of agency decision-making, and promoting agency responsiveness to a wide range of interests. Administrators who know that their actions may be subjected to review by the courts can be expected to exercise greater overall care, making better, fairer, and more responsive decisions than administrators who are insulated from direct oversight.

Notwithstanding the beneficial effects of courts on the administrative process, legal scholars also have emphasized increasingly courts’ potentially debilitating effects on agencies. It has widely been accepted, for example, that administrators in the United States confront a high probability that their actions will be subject to litigation. Cross-national research suggests that courts figure more prominently in government administration in the USA than in other countries (Brickman et al. 1985, Kagan 1991). The threat of judicial review has been viewed as creating significant delays for agencies seeking to develop regulations (McGarity 1992).

In some cases, agencies have been said to have retreated altogether from efforts to establish regulations. The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is usually cited as the clearest case of this so-called ‘ossification’ effect, with one major study suggesting that NHTSA has shifted away from developing new auto safety standards in order to avoid judicial reversal (Mashaw and Harfst 1990). Other research, however, indicates that the threat of judicial interference in agency decision-making has generally been overstated. Litigation
challenging administrative action in the United States occurs less frequently than is generally assumed (Harrington 1988, Coglianese 1997), and some research indicates that agencies can surmount seemingly adverse judicial decisions to achieve their policy objectives (Jordan 2000).

Concern over excessive adversarialism in the administrative process persists in many countries. Government decision makers worldwide are pursuing collaborative or consensus-based processes when creating and implementing administrative policies. In the United States, an innovation called negotiated rulemaking has been used by more than a dozen administrative agencies, specifically in an effort to prevent subsequent litigation. In a negotiated rulemaking, representatives from government, business, and nongovernmental organizations work toward agreement on proposed administrative policies (Harter 1982). In practice, however, these agreements have not reduced subsequent litigation, in part because litigation has ordinarily been less frequent than generally thought (Coglianese 1997).

Moreover, even countries with more consensual, corporatist policy structures experience litigation over administrative issues, often because lawsuits can help outside groups penetrate
close-knit policy networks (Sellers 1995). In pluralist systems such as the United States, litigation is typically viewed as a normal part of the policy process, and insiders to administrative processes tend to go to court at least as often as outsiders (Coglianese 1996).

Courts’ impact on the process of governance has been and will remain a staple issue for administrative law. In order to understand how law can have a positive influence on governing institutions within society, it is vital to examine how judicial institutions affect the behavior of government organizations. Empirical research on the social meaning and behavioral impact of litigation in an administrative setting has the potential for improving prescriptive efforts to craft judicial principles or redesign administrative procedures in ways that contribute to more effective and legitimate governance. (1)

Resources

Notes and References

  1. C. Coglianese, Administrative Law, International Encyclopedia

See Also

  • Civil Law
  • Democracy
  • Dispute Resolution
  • Environment Regulation
  • Governments
  • Judicial Review
  • Legitimacy
  • Occupational Health
  • Regulation
  • Public Administration
  • Administration

Further Reading

  • Brickman R, Jasanoff S, Ilgen T 1985 Controlling Chemicals: The Politics of Regulation in Europe and the United States. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
  • Coglianese C 1996 Litigating within relationships: Disputes and disturbance in the regulatory process. Law and Society Review 30: 735–65
  • Coglianese C 1997 Assessing consensus: The promise and performance of negotiated rulemaking. Duke Law Journal 46: 1255–349
  • Edley C F Jr 1990 Administrative Law: Rethinking Judicial Control of Bureaucracy. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT
  • Harrington C 1988 Regulatory reform: Creating gaps and making markets. Law and Policy 10: 293
  • Harter P J 1982 Negotiating regulations: A cure for malaise. Georgetown Law Journal 71: 1–118
  • Hawkins K (ed.) 1992 The Uses of Discretion. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
  • Jordan W S 2000 Ossification revisited: Does arbitrary and capricious review significantly interfere with agency ability to achieve regulatory goals through informal rulemaking?Northwestern University Law Review 94: 393–450
  • Kagan R A 1991 Adversarial legalism and American government. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 10: 369–406
  • Lowi T J 1979 The End of Liberalism: The Second Republic of the United States. W. W. Norton, New York
  • Information about District Court Administrators in the Gale Encyclopedia of American Law.
  • Mashaw J L 1985 Prodelegation: Why administrators should make political decisions. Journal of Law, Econ., and Organization 1: 81
  • Mashaw J L, Harfst D L 1990 The Struggle for Auto Safety. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
  • McCubbins M, Noll R, Weingast B 1987 Administrative procedures as instruments of political control. Journal of Law, Econ., and Organization 3: 243
  • McGarity T O 1992 Some thoughts on ‘deossifying’ the rulemaking process. Duke Law Journal 41: 1385–462
  • Revesz R L 1997 Environmental regulation, ideology, and the D.C. Circuit. Virginia Law Review 83: 1717–72
  • Schuck P H, Elliott E D 1990 To the Chevron station: An empirical study of federal administrative law. Duke Law Journal 1990: 984–1077
  • Sellers J M 1995 Litigation as a local political resource: Courts in controversies over land use in France, Germany, and the United States. Law and Society Review 29: 475
  • Shapiro M 1988 Who Guards the Guardians? Judicial Control of Administration. University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA
  • Stewart R B 1975 The reformation of American administrative law. Harvard Law Review 88: 1667–813
  • Stigler G J 1971 The theory of economic regulation. Bell Journal of Econ. and Manag. Sci. 2: 3
  • Sunstein C R 1990 After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

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