Work gets delegated OR new resources are added.
Levy ’13 [Marin; 2013; Associate Professor of Law at the Duke University School of Law, JD from Yale Law School; University of Chicago Law Review, “Judging the Flood of Litigation,” vol. 80]
To be sure, judicial workload is a critical concern. As noted earlier, the lower courts have faced rising caseloads over the last several decades 285 - a fact the justices have emphasized. 286 Today, both federal district and appellate judges must contend with hundreds of filings per year, 287 meaning that their ability to give attention to individual cases is greatly reduced. Employing the tools at hand, district judges have come to rely more heavily on the aid of magistrate judges, 288 and appellate judges have come to rely on the assistance of staff attorneys and other case-management tools to cope with their workload. 289 Still, judges and scholars alike have called for an expansion of the bench 290 and limiting the flow of cases 291 to alleviate the strain on the federal courts. Thus, when the justices express their desire to avoid inviting new claims into federal courts, the underlying concern is not a trivial one. 292 The critical question, though, is [*1066] whether considerations of judicial workload can stand as an independent factor in shaping the Court's interpretation of substantive law.