(5 of 5)
One chance for administrative improvement lies in the assignment of judges. Explains Vanderbilt: "It is intolerably bad business administration to have some judges overworked while others sit by half idle . . . This means that someone must be given the power to assign the trial judges to those courts where they are most needed." The obvious person to be given this administrative power, says Vanderbilt, is the top judicial officer in each state (in most cases, the chief justice).
If the chief justice is to have administrative responsibility in addition to his judicial duties, he must have full-time professional help. Only 13 states (plus Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia) now have such offices of judicial administration. An example of their work is seen in the weekly summary of reports from every New Jersey judge, listing hours spent on the bench, cases and motions heard, and decisions reserved. These reports on individual performance are distributed to all judges. The effect on indolent judges when their laziness is thus exposed has, Arthur Vanderbilt says tersely, been "truly remarkable."
The fight for improved court systems is not one that can be—or should be—confined to the legal profession. Judge Vanderbilt candidly says that "where cures have occurred, they have generally been effected under the impetus of a popular revolt of laymen against the quaint professional notion that the courts exist primarily for the benefit of judges and lawyers and only incidentally for the benefit of the litigants and the state." Against the members of the bar and the bench who stand in the way of reform, Vanderbilt issues a scathing indictment: "I am convinced that the criminals, the gangsters, the corrupt local officials, the Communistic subversives who would undermine and overthrow our Government with bloodshed and terror such as we have seen abroad . . . are no more dangerous to the country at large than the judges [and lawyers], many of them amiable gentlemen, who oppose either openly or covertly every change in procedural law and administration that would serve to eliminate technicalities, surprise, and undue delay in the law simply because they would be called upon to learn new rules of procedure or new and more effective methods of work."
* Arthur Vanderbilt was once the Republican leader of Essex County.