General courts, specialized courts, and the complementarity effect

Of Specialized Courts

Introduction This Overview has two primary purposes. First, it provides judicial system officials with the arguments in favor of and in opposition to the creation of specialized courts. Second, it offers recommendations for consideration by judicial system officials when they are deliberating whether to establish specialized courts. This Overview also provides a review of types of specialized c...

The Fall and Rise of Specialized Federal Constitutional Courts

Most constitutional challenges in federal court to federal statutes are litigated in the familiar pattern of a decision by a single U.S. District Judge, followed by an appeal to a three-judge panel of one of the U.S. Court of Appeals, followed by the filing of a writ of certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court, which has discretion to grant or deny the writ. Sometimes, however, Congress requires a ...

The Verdict on Drug Courts and Other Problem-Solving Courts

Scientists, in contrast, rarely speak of verdicts. To the scientist, virtually all conclusions are provisional and subject to revision as new data become available. Much of what is believed to be true turns out, after the collection of more information, to be only partially true, conditionally true, or sometimes outright false.1 It is, therefore, most prudent to withhold final judgment until al...

Criminologist and the Courts

Do specialty courts achieve better outcomes for children in foster care than general courts?

OBJECTIVE This study assessed the effects of unified family and drug treatment courts (DTCs) on the resolution of cases involving foster care children and the resulting effects on school performance. METHOD The first analytic step was to assess the impacts of presence of unified and DTCs in North Carolina counties on time children spent in foster care and the type of placement at exit from fo...