| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Rise of Judicial Management in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955–2000. By Steven Harmon Wilson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. xvi, 559 pp. $64.95, ISBN 0-8203-2363-2.)

As Steven Harmon Wilson argues in The Rise of Judicial Management in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1955–2000, "until relatively recently, federal district courts have not been well investigated by historians, especially in comparison to the historical focus on developments in the U.S. Supreme Court" (p. 3). In an effort to remedy this gap in the literature and provide "a continuation of, and I hope a complement to," Charles Zelden's Justice Lies in the District: The U.S. District Court, Southern District of Texas, 1902–1960 (1993), Wilson has written "a history of a single representative federal district court during a period of great change" (ibid.). His purpose, in large part, is

to demonstrate, through a narrative that is generally organized along chronological and topical lines, that the rise in both criminal and civil caseloads in the Southern District of Texas, and the changing nature of the judicial service sought by politicians or plaintiffs, led to the multiplication of supporting personnel, which in turn forced the federal district judges to become by necessity managers—of their growing courts, burgeoning dockets, and proliferating personnel—as well as to continue acting as the umpires of legal disputes. (p. 6)

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