Specializing the Courts

Baum Lawrence

Most Americans think that judges should be, and are, generalists who decide a wide array of cases. Nonetheless, we now have specialized courts in many key policy areas".Specializing the Courts" provides the first comprehensive analysis of this growing trend toward specialization in the federal and state court systems.

Lawrence Baum incisively explores the scope, causes, and consequences of judicial specialization in four areas that include most specialized courts: foreign policy and national security, criminal law, economic issues involving the government, and economic issues in the private sector. Baum examines the process by which court systems in the United States have become increasingly specialized and the motives that have led to the growth of specialization. He also considers the effects of judicial specialization on the work of the courts by demonstrating that under certain conditions, specialization can and does have fundamental effects on the policies that courts make. For this reason, the movement toward greater specialization constitutes a major change in the judiciary.

Reviews

"Lawrence Baum knows how to do it well, and this book is no exception. Crisply written and elegant, with clear documentation, Baum's work is likely to be just as significant as the trend towards judicial specialization. I can think of no comparable treatment of specialized courts as a whole – so much so that this book may spark an entirely new genre of court studies. Widely appealing not only to scholars in the fields of law, political science, and sociology, but to general readers alike, 'Specializing the Courts' is a landmark treatment of a very important phenomenon, written by a major scholar, encyclopedic in its range and depth. It will be the go-to source on this topic for years to come" – Charles R. Epp, University of Kansas

"Lawrence Blum has done it again. He has written a book that cried out to be written and has done so exceedingly well. 'Specializing the Courts' is a monumental statement that the obscurity of specialized courts is fast coming to an end because of the growing 'movement' toward specialization of the judicial function. This book is the most illuminating account of judicial specialization to date and its coverage is exceptional, in both breadth and depth. In researching and documenting the historical trajectory of judicial specialization, Baum uncovers detailed information about obscure, even strange, specialized courts that lay readers and even informed observers are likely to find illuminating and intriguing. This will be a welcome addition for scholars and students in several fields, as it fills an important vacuum in our knowledge of American court systems and in particular, our understanding of specialization as a structural attribute of the courts" – Isaac Unah, University of North Carolina

"This is the first book to deal with the subject of specialized courts in a comprehensive manner. It succeeds masterfully. 'Specializing the Courts' nicely illustrates the use of case histories as a method for reaching systematic and theoretically interesting conclusions. Baum's argument – the origins and consequences of judicial specialization vary systematically over time and across courts – will appeal to scholars of both social science and legal studies" – Forrest Maltzman, George Washington University

Back to the list of books