The crisis of crisis management in the courts

Heydebrand, W. and Seron, C., 1990. The crisis of crisis management in the courts. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 4: 77-98. 1.. Since 1960, US district courts have faced a mounting volume and complexity in their caseload and, simultaneously, a relative decline in the fiscal and orga-nizational resources available to meet the rising demand. Courts are attempt-ing to manage this double threat to their identity by adopting a combination of computerization and a strategy of informalism, much like other organizations in the public and private sector. But courts are unique among public sector organizations in that formal-legal rules play a constitutive role in their orga-nization and procedures. Insofar as informal and technocratic strategies of cri-sis management become functionally autonomous, they tend to undermine the normative premises of courts and generate a second-order problem, viz, a crisis of crisis management