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How Federal Judicial Administration Came To Be The Way It Is, Robert A. Leflar

Vanderbilt Law Review

Differences about how the business of federal circuit and district courts should be administered--as distinguished from how their cases should be decided--down through the years have presented a persistent conflict between an ideal of national uniformity and an effort to maintain local control over administrative details. In one sense this has been a contest between reformers who have sought increased efficiency in federal judicial administration and local judges whose rallying cry was judicial independence and whose personal interest was in continuing to run things as they were accustomed within their own little domains. Occasionally patronage was involved. This did not …