Federal court clog causes collapses the federal judiciary – overburdens dockets, expansion can’t keep pace – decimates Supreme Court and rule of law

Personal effects: The hidden costs greater workloads. The hallmark of federal justice traditionally has been the searching analysis and thoughtful opinion of a highly competent judge, endowed with the time as well as the intelligence to grasp and resolve the most nuanced issues of fact and law. Swollen dockets create assembly-line conditions, which threaten the ability of the modern federal judge to meet this high standard of quality in federal adjudication. No one expects a federal judge to function without an adequate level of available tangible resources: sufficient courtroom and chambers space, competent administrative and research staff, a good library, and a comfortable salary that relieves the judge from personal financial pressure. Although salary levels have lagged--encouraging judges to engage in the limited teaching and publication activities that are their sole means of meeting such newly pressing financial obligations as the historically high mortgage expenses and college tuitions of the present decade-in the main, federal judges have received a generous allocation of tangible resources. It is unlikely that there is any further significant gain to be realized in the productivity of individual federal judges through increased levels of tangible resources,13 other than by redressing the pressure to earn supplemental income.1 On a personal level, the most important resource available to the federal judge is time."5 Caseload pressures secondary to the indiscriminate federalization of state law are stealing time from federal judges, shrinking the increments available for each case. Federal judges have been forced to compensate by operating more like executives and less like judges. They cannot read their briefs as carefully as they would like, and they are driven to rely unduly on law clerks for research and writing that they would prefer to do themselves.16 If federal judges need more time to hear and decide each case, an obvious and easy solution is to spread the work by the appointment of more and more federal judges. Congress has been generous in the recent creation of new judgeships,17 and enlargement of the federal judiciary is likely to continue to be the default response, albeit a more grudging one, to judicial concern over the caseload consequences of jurisdictional reallocation. Systemic effects: The hidden costs of adding more judges. Increasing the size of the federal judiciary creates institutional strains that reduce and must ultimately rule out its continued acceptability as a countermeasure to caseload growth. While the dilution of workload through the addition of judges is always incrementally attractive, in the long run it will cause the present system to collapse. I am not persuaded by arguments that the problem lies in the declining quality of the pool of lawyers willing to assume the federal bench18 or in the greater risk that, as the ranks of federal judges expand, there will be more frequent lapses of judgment by the president and the Senate in seating the mediocre on the federal bench.19 In my view, the diminished desirability of federal judicial office is more than offset by the rampant dissatisfaction of modern lawyers with the excessive commercialization of the practice of law. There is no shortage of sound judicial prospects willing and able to serve, and no sign that the selection process-never the perfect meritocracy-is becoming less effective in screening out the unfit or undistinguished. Far more serious are other institutional effects of continuously compounding the number of federal judges. Collegiality among judges, consistency of decision, and coherence of doctrine across courts are all imperiled by the growth of federal courts to cattle-car proportions. Yet the ability of the system to tolerate proliferation of courts proportional to the proliferation of judges is limited, and while collapse is not imminent, it cannot be postponed indefinitely. Congress could restructure the federal trial and appellate courts without imperiling the core functions, but the limiting factor is the capacity of the Supreme Court to maintain overall uniformity in the administration and application of federal law. That Court is not only the crown but the crowning jewel of a 200-year-old system of the rule of law within a constitutional democracy, and any tinkering with its size or jurisdiction would raise the most serious questions of the future course of the nation.