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26 Third Branch 1 (1994)

handle is hein.journals/thirdbran26 and id is 1 raw text is: THE B R.A iN[ C I imae' 1994 Chief Justice's 1993 Year-end Report Highlights Cost-saving Measures As we close the books on 1993 and anticipate 1994, those who work in the Third Branch can look back with satisfac- tion on a good year's work. The federal courts again handled an enor- mous volume of cases, the Executive Branch re- sponded to the judiciary's call for im- proved communications, Congress helped the fed- eral courts in several im- portant respects, and the Third Branch undertook internal reforms that will improve its ability to meet the chal- lenges of the future. Opportunities will abound for creative reform in 1994; the most important of them will be driven by tight federal bud- gets and diminished resources. An era of austerity will require changes in the way the judiciary does its in- ternal business. It will also require changes in the habits and expecta- tions of professional users of the sys- tem-lawyers and judges who be- came accustomed to doing things a certain way when the system was under far less pressure. (L to R) Prior to her swearing-in creimony, Justice Ruth Bader C stands for a photo with Justice Sandra Day O'Cotor. The Need to Allocate Resources Rationally Fiscal austerity reminds us that we can no longer indulge all of those habits and expectations, particularly those that rest on the assumption that the justice system is an unlim- ited resource. In 1951, the great Learned Hand admonished an audi- ence of lawyers that Thou shall not ration Justice. He was urging his lis- teners to provide legal services to the needy, but his aphorism has become a handy weapon for those opposed to any effort to allocate judicial resources based on their limited availability. Hand's aphorism has been used indiscriminately to challenge many re- cent reforms in the fed- eral courts, such as limits on discovery, changes in appellate procedures, or propos- als to achieve a rational allocation of jurisdic- tion among the federal insburg and state systems. Like most aphorisms, how- ever, Hand's words can be used to prove too much. He was speaking of justice-the end product-not of the retention of ev- ery procedure to which judges and lawyers may have become accus- tomed. Just as now we have a clearer sense that federal budget resources are finite, we need also to recognize that the judicial machinery the bud- get supports is a scarce commodity. In the future, doing justice will re- quire that the use of judicial re- sources be regulated to assure that they are available on the utilitarian basis of the greatest good for the greatest number, not simply on the See Year-end Report on page 2

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