In writing the third book to emerge from a prolific research project, the authors of THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE faced the somewhat enviable, and somewhat intimidating, task of building upon a widely read stream of publications to offer new and provocative insights into the criminal adjudication process. According to the authors, the three books -- THE CONTOURS OF JUSTICE (1987), THE TENOR OF JUSTICE (19880, and THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE -- were planned as a trilogy, as a series that, employing the same data base and observational research, would explore and develop three sets of questions about the operations of criminal courts in middle-sized communities. Hence the strengths and weaknesses of this contribution should be assessed against three criteria: First, to what extent does this book synthesize, build upon and develop relevant concepts that emerged from the first two works, as well as the numerous studies generated by this project that have been reported in article form? Second, what does this work contribute more generally to the literature on criminal courts? Third, to what extent do the authors' analyses and conclusions define and clarify a research agenda for others interested in studying judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers?
The focus of Flemming, Nardulli, and Eisenstein's research in THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE is "the learned and adaptive knowledge that guides practitioners in getting things done within the courthouse" (p. 4). This statement of research purpose, as well as the qualitative methodological strategy, is strongly reminiscent of Milton Heumann's classic study of Connecticut court actors. While Heumann's (1977) study concentrated on the adaptation of new judges, prosecutors, and lawyers to the norms and practices of criminal courts, Flemming et al focus their efforts on describing and, to some extent, accounting for variation in the strategies and practices that judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers adopt as they pursue personal and organizational goals.
The authors derive several broad conclusions, some of which are quite predictable (although none the less valuable for being illustrated again) and some of which are unexpected. Their delineation of judicial objectives, and of the nature of bench politics, is consistent with other studies of local legal cultures. They conclude, reasonably, that judges' willingness to work collegially, or at least under conditions of sincere and reasoned disagreement about policy issues, determines the degree to which judges collectively retain influence over criminal adjudication practices in the face of prosecutors' considerable political and discretionary power. Similarly, the discussion of defense lawyers' motivations and incentives, and of the politics of indigent defense, is by now familiar, but the authors do an admirable job of illustrating the dilemmas faced by lawyers as they trade off the business needs of their practices with their professional priorities.
Because prosecutors are probably the least scrutinized actors in the criminal courts, the discussion of their motives may be one of the strongest contributions of the study. Flemming et al maintain that prosecutors purposefully organize their offices and deploy their resources in order to conserve (or increase) their status vis a vis judges and lawyers; further, they conclude that policies and practices can often be interpreted as expressions of the chief's political views. They also illustrate the often-observed response of deputies to overly-zealous efforts to constrain their behavior to policy. Power and status within the courthouse often comes at the price of discontent and even policy circumvention among subordinates.
These broad themes are illustrated as the authors let the judges, prosecutors, and
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lawyers of nine courts speak for themselves. While the first book of the series, THE CONTOURS OF JUSTICE, examined the legal cultures of these nine towns, adopting a somewhat similar expository approach, and while THE TENOR OF JUSTICE systematically examined the aggregate output of these crafts, plea agreements and sentences, this study extracts each set of actors from their communities and from their collective products, concentrating instead on the commonalities and differences in the crafts of prosecuting, judging, and defending. This approach yields more detail and insight into the strategies and motives of actors, although a reader unfamiliar with the earlier works might have difficulty interpreting the varying contexts in which these strategies and motives develop. Hence one standard against which to evaluate this work is the value it adds to what has already emerged from this prolific research effort. However, THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE could also be thought of as the most recent link in a rather impressive chain of case studies, some comparative and some not, of courthouse norms and practices, and hence should be evaluated in terms of what we have already learned from the case studies that emerged in the late 1970s. Finally, this work could be subjected to what might be called the "graduate syllabus test": does it sufficiently skillfully knit together existing and new knowledge to create a design for future research, thereby constituting the sort of contribution that should be read and digested by young scholars entering the field?
THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE usefully pulls together some of the authors' observations and conclusions that have been published elsewhere in contexts less directly focused on examining individual attitudes toward court work. In this respect, it is a valuable resource for the study of court actors; by focusing explicitly on the craft of court work, the authors succeed in highlighting themes that are subtle undertones in previous publications. However, the authors' choices about what to include and emphasize are puzzling in three respects.
First, some very interesting and provocative conclusions of preceding work are scarcely visible in this book. An important example occurs in the chapters on defense lawyers, where the authors' previously published work on lawyers' differential perceptions of public and private clients (Flemming, 1986) is cited but not adequately reproduced in the context of the broader discussion of incentives and motivations.
Second, the authors seem to rely heavily on the unjustifiable assumption that readers have read (or will read) the other volumes in the series. For instance, this assumption is implicit in the discussions of other actors' perceptions of attorneys' competence, discussions which skim the surface of the methodology as well as the more substantive discussion of the relevance of these perceptions developed in other studies (Nardulli et al, 1984). More generally, the book offers too little background information on the communities, and too little summary of the substantive findings of previous work, to allow it to be a "stand-alone" contribution; one's ability to evaluate its contribution depends a bit too much on one's familiarity with preceding publications.
Third, although THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE echoes some of the themes that emerge from discussions of attitudes and practices in THE TENOR OF JUSTICE, the conceptual and semantic linkages are less developed than one might expect. For instance, the earlier book developed, in a descriptive way, a conceptualization of "work orientations" that presumably cuts across courthouse role and that is comprised of attitudes toward personnel, the use of discretion, and the value of innovation and technology. This conceptualization yielded three characterizations: orientations that focus on (1) formal and structural elements of work, (2) efficiency considerations, and (3) pragmatic concerns. While these orientations clearly have greatest applicability to the work of prosecutors, they are potentially useful heuristics in understanding the behavior of judges and public defenders as well. One might have expected THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE to exploit this conceptualization explicitly, subjecting it to scrutiny in order to
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assess its empirical value and its usefulness for future studies of court actors.
However, the more recent book, while echoing some of the themes inherent in these characterizations, nonetheless provides a looser and less structured description of attitudes and behavior. The conceptualization of craft focuses instead on career building, organizational leadership, courtroom success, and building networks. These are important dimensions of work, and hence one wishes that the authors' hypotheses about their relationships with broader attitudinal orientations had been more fully developed. That they were not may be the consequence of the authors' realization that the neatness of the original work orientation typology does not really fit the realities of courthouse motives, a conclusion that would not surprise many students of criminal adjudication. All the same, a higher degree of conceptual continuity would have been valuable for those readers who have familiarized themselves with other products of this research effort. In this vein, the authors' frequent cites to their own publications are a bit frustrating; a more intellectually satisfying work would have encompassed as well as expanded upon what the authors had already concluded from their immersion in these nine courthouses, rather than leaving the reader to recall and synthesize these diverse studies on his or her own.
As a contribution to the broader literature on criminal courts, this book (and its companions) constitute a valuable addition for several reasons. First, it departs from much of the literature by examining middle-sized courts (those in counties with on average about 500,000 residents), rather than highly urbanized jurisdictions whose complexity and crime problems may severely constrain their generalizability to other courts.
Second, the authors not surprisingly explicitly build upon concepts developed fifteen years ago in James Eisenstein's and Herbert Jacob's classic, FELONY JUSTICE (1977), thus generating valuable but surprisingly uncommon continuity in the theoretical maturation of organizational models of court decision making. Particularly in its attention to the administrative dilemmas that arise in sponsoring organizations (especially in prosecutors' offices), in its discussion of the significance of seemingly mundane issues such as calendaring and case assignment, and in its explicit recognition of the power distributions across the three sets of actors, THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE sustains a set of important research questions that have been too seldom addressed by recent researchers more intrigued by more highly visible policy issues and by methodological innovations in aggregate sentencing studies. The book would be an even more compelling contribution had its authors been able to fully synthesize data on court actors' behavior with their candid but qualitative self- descriptions; and in addressing matters such as adaptation, career success, and working style, it would have been desirable to draw upon case data to profile the performance of these actors. However, such a synthesis of qualitative and quantitative gleanings may have been practically unfeasible.
Finally, one must ask whether this book not only pulls together our accumulated knowledge about the people who process criminal cases, but also whether, through challenge or reification of existing understandings, it helps to clarify a set of research questions for another generation of court researchers. It falls a bit short on the first standard, although, at least implicitly, it addresses the second. THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE does not dwell long on the findings and contradictions in previous research, and is instead content to refer readers to appropriate citations; this limits its value as a definitive work on court actors insofar as it limits its accountability to existing research. Revealingly, the only list of references (apart from the index) in the book is a list of publications generated by the authors themselves. However, by echoing critically important and understudied themes in the study of local legal culture, the authors help to define a research agenda for scholars interested in building a systematic empirical foundation around the
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hypotheses generated by case study research. A few of these themes or issues remain puzzling or incompletely stated to readers. For instance, although Flemming et al frequently allude to the suburban, blue-collar, or economically free-standing nature of the communities they study, the significance of communities' political and economic profiles for adjudication is only faintly sketched. However, political scientists interested in the impact of community culture on political and legal culture will welcome the acknowledgement of these potential political linkages. Students who do not altogether concur with the authors' subtle acceptance of the inevitability as well as the social value of non-adversarial practices will nonetheless appreciate the book's emphasis on power relationships as determinants of courthouse norms. Scholars who do not accept one-dimensional portraits of prosecutors as bureaucrats will value the insights into prosecutors' political motivations, even in the absence of meaningful public pressure.
In summary, this book is a useful contribution. It neither redefines the field nor writes the final chapter on courthouse actors; indeed, the authors could hardly have intended that. For the purposes of securing a permanent and distinguished place in library of criminal court scholars and students, the authors might have been somewhat better served to have synthesized their diverse findings into a single volume, not only for the practical purpose of economy and conciseness but also for the intellectual purpose of imposing conceptual consistency and continuity on what is essentially a very ambitious study of local legal cultures. The risk in such an approach to dissemination, however, is the loss of texture and detail that is one of the strongest assets of THE CRAFT OF JUSTICE.
References
Eisenstein, James and Herbert Jacob. 1977. FELONY JUSTICE: AN ORGANIZATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CRIMINAL COURTS. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Eisenstein, James, Roy B. Flemming and Peter Nardulli. 1987. THE CONTOURS OF JUSTICE: COMMUNITIES AND THEIR COURTS. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
Roy B. Flemming. 1986. Client games: defense attorney perspectives on their relations with criminal clients. AMERICAN BAR FOUNDATION RESEARCH JOURNAL 1986: 253.
Heumann, Milton. 1977. PLEA BARGAINING: THE EXPERIENCES OF PROSECUTORS, JUDGES, AND DEFENSE ATTORNEYS. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nardulli, Peter F., Roy B. Flemming, and James Eisenstein. 1984. Unraveling the complexities of decision making in face-to-face groups: a contextual analysis of plea-bargained sentences. AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW 78: 912.
Nardulli, Peter F., James Eisenstein, and Roy B. Flemming. 1988. THE TENOR OF JUSTICE: CRIMINAL COURTS AND THE GUILTY PLEA PROCESS. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
