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Decreeing Organizational Change: Judicial Supervision Of Public Institutions, Donald L. Horowitz

Duke Law Journal

In the last fifteen years or so, courts have issued a small but significant number of decrees requiring that governmental bodies reorganize themselves so that their behavior will comport with certain legal standards. Such decrees, addressed to school systems, prison and mental hospital officials, welfare administrators, and public housing authorities, insert trial courts in the ongoing business of public administration. In this article, Professor Horowitz traces the origins, characteristics, and consequences of organizational change decrees. He finds their roots in an unusually fluid and indeterminate system of procedural forms and legal rules, a system hospitable to the impact of changing …