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Defining the Field of Judicial Administration
Levy, Marin K.
Levy, Marin K.
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Abstract
How do we define an academic field?
You may be charmed to know that the word “field” was inherited from Germanic, and its original form—“feld”—meant “open country.” We may think of fields of study, then, as plots of land that we come to cultivate.
Or we may think of fields in more celestial terms. Academic fields do, after all, bear a certain resemblance to stars. They are born, they expand, they contract, they die out, and eventually some of their matter is taken up by new fields. If the “Programme of Instruction” of our friends in Cambridge is any guide, a century ago law students were expected to take courses in, among other subjects, equity. (Today, equity might be the white dwarf of legal fields—a stellar remnant, if you will.)
Yet as much as this second metaphor may illuminate, it is missing a critical element of the first: the hand that we, as scholars, have in shaping these fields. To wit, remedies exists as a coherent body of study today because of past choices made by judges and academics—among them, such luminaries as Charles E. Clark and Charles Alan Wright. As the great Doug Laycock wrote in How Remedies Became a Field: A History, “It was not inevitable that there would come to be courses, casebooks, treatises, and all-day workshops on the law of remedies.” It was because these figures thought there should be a field dedicated to the following question—What should a Court do to correct an actual or threatened violation of law?—that material moved from other fields to establish a coherent plane of inquiry for students and academics today.
Federal courts exists as we know it because of the particular choices of Henry Hart and Herbert Wechsler, some seventy years ago. It was their insights—their connections under the themes of federalism, separation-of-powers, and what courts are good for (and not good for)—that established the field that many of us play on today. And the Legal Process School exists along with it because of the tilling of Hart and Wechsler and the rich questions posed by the same Hart and Albert Sacks—namely, who ought to make a given legal decision and how ought that decision be made?
My rather bold claim today is that it is time for us to chart a new field of study within law: the field of judicial administration.