Court Management Executive Summary - Essay Example

COURT MANAGEMENT (Executive Summary) of EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The courts exist primarily to render judgment and dispense justice. As such, these must be done in a fast, efficient and impartial manner to gain the trust of the people in the system and so thereby ensure order in a society; otherwise, people will be tempted to take the law into their own hands and chaos will result, for example in which people will resort to vigilantism wherein justice is given from the barrel of a gun. A good and reliable justice system is the hallmark of a civilized society where people go to the courts for redress of their grievances and expect their complaints will be attended to in a just and equitable manner with dispatch and without delays.

The purposes of a court as enumerated above serve as its constitutional mandate and this can be achieved if the courts plan their work well despite the sheer number of cases they to deal with. In order to be able to carry its mandate, the entire judicial system consisting of the trial, appellate, and the supreme courts must plan out their activities through strategic planning that will forestall any delays while maximizing the use of all its available personnel and material resources. Successful court management takes into account the nature of judicial administration as an integral part of public administration and it is designed to promote judicial independence and at the same time promote its autonomy as a co-equal branch of the government in the separation of powers doctrine to prevent one person or a small group from acquiring too much influence.

Its success is measured through a variety of performance measures such as budgetary management under financial resource constraints, number of cases or workload successfully litigated and the speed of how these cases are being processed through the system, which in turn measure both its efficiency and responsiveness to public demands for justice (Allen & Sawhney, 2009, p. 347) in which justice is dispensed without fear or favor, either from politics or special interest groups. The court system in the United States of America is composed of two levels which are trial courts and appellate courts (both at state and federal levels).

This requires the use of either a chief judge who manages the court system by selecting and assigning judges, control expenses to ensure it stays within the budget, appoint probation and pretrial officers, supervise all personnel and impose disciplinary actions if warranted, and perform other administrative duties to make the entire system function smoothly and render the ends of justice to everybody, or the appointment of a court administrator for these purposes. To carry out its mandate; it must do the following:Have a vision – this is an important aspect of the usual business management practice of articulating a clear mission and vision to guide future actions of any entity and which can also be applied to the court system.

It is the chief judge who is primarily tasked to do this job as he is in the best position to enunciate his objectives during his term but it must be done for the long term. It can be just a simple statement that will encapsulate all that the court system aspires to do. Strategic planning – regular meetings can be held (quarterly or annually) in which usual concerns of judges and court personnel are discussed and tackled in the sessions so its objectives for the coming year can be met, considering external factors that impinge on its job of rendering an important public service by the dispensation of justice.

The purposes of strategic planning are to assess the expected volume of caseload, availability of personnel and funding, and find ways to improve efficiency such as adoption of computerization (Fabri & Contini, 2001, p. 7).A good proposal to enhance the system is to restructure the existing hierarchy in which there are several trial courts (unified or segmented) and appellate courts (single or multiple) in a state and combine these into one single, unified or centralized method like the Federal system to increase efficiency and reduce both the time and costs involved in litigating all these cases.

ReferencesAllen, J. M. & Sawhney, R. (2009). Administration and management in criminal justice: A service quality approach. Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications.Fabri, M. & Contini, F. (2001). Justice and technology in Europe: How ICT is changing the judicial business. Norwell, MA, USA: Kluwer Law International.