The One-Courtroom, One-Judge Policy: A Preliminary Review
Abstract
Businesses, the military, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations frequently use mathematical techniques to improve their understanding of the operation of complex systems and to help ensure the efficient use of resources. This Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis applies one such technique to simulate the flow of trials through a federal court system and to assess the impact on trial delays of providing less than one courtroom per judge. The analysis is based on data collected by the General Accounting Office (GAO); it indicates that the sharing of courtrooms by judges should not cause major trial delays, as some have suggested. More specifically, most examples examined by CBO illustrate that courtroom sharing would not cause delays for more than 95 percent of trials and that for those few that were delayed, the waiting time would generally average less than half a day. CBO's analysis has important limitations, however, and firmer conclusions would require further research.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA399612
Entities
Organizations
- Congressional Budget Office