|
Court
Community Communication
What
This Core Competency Is and Why It Is Important
 Curriculum
Guidelines
Purpose
and Communication Fundamentals
Understandable
Courts Community
Outreach Public
Information The
Media and Media Relations Leadership
and Program Management
People
do not trust what they do not understand.
The Trial Court Performance Standards recognize Public Trust
and Confidence as a critical area of court performance, equal in
importance and related to Access to Justice; Expedition and Timeliness;
Fairness, Equality, and Integrity; and Independence and Accountability. Accountability and Independence Standards require trial
courts “ … to inform and educate the public.”
Here we go further. This
Guideline challenges court leaders to educate, inform, and teach the
public about the courts, but also to be educated, informed, and taught by
the community.
In
his seminal 1906 speech to the American Bar Association, published in the
first issue of Judicature in 1913, Roscoe Pound made a
timeless observation in his first sentence: “Dissatisfaction with the
administration of justice is as old as law.”
Survey results from more than 35 states over the past quarter
century confirm Pound’s insight. Most
public surveys indicate that the public generally neither understands nor
is satisfied with court performance.
The
fact that the court cannot always be on the side of public opinion
energizes effective court leaders. They
work toward understandable courts and deserved public trust and confidence
precisely because there is no guarantee that public perceptions will
reflect even truly excellent court performance.
Court
leadership is as critical here as it is with respect to caseflow
management. Court Community
Communication requires balance between maintaining judicial impartiality
and independence and the adversarial process and ensuring that the court
and its leaders communicate with and learn from diverse publics.
Distance and reserve is critical to the judicial process, but it
need not lead to judicial reserve or institutional isolation. Isolation is
harmful to effective interaction with and understanding of the community
and response to legitimate public questions, concerns, and insights about
courts and court performance. With
effective leadership, the local legal culture can advance rather than
retard both the pace of litigation and court community communication.
Print
and broadcast news are consistently the greatest sources of information
about our courts and probably the most influential forces in formulating
public understanding of and satisfaction with the courts. More Americans believe that cases are handled in a “poor
manner” than in an “excellent manner.”
Findings
from more than 30 years of surveys indicate that the public thinks that
cases are not decided in a timely fashion and that resolving a matter
through the courts is too expensive.
But the challenges go deeper.
The prestigious 1999 National Center for State Courts survey (How
the Public Views the State Courts: Findings from a 1999 Survey) also
revealed that both Hispanics and African Americans feel that they are
routinely treated “worse” in court than Caucasians.
Significantly, Caucasians and Hispanics perceived that African
Americans are not treated as well as others who come to court.
While the public’s view of judges is more positive than their
view of courts generally, almost half of those polled in 1999 agreed that
courts are “out- of-touch with what’s going on in their
communities.” An
overwhelming majority of those polled agree that, “Politics influence
court decisions.”
Competent
court leaders understand that now as in Pound’s day, there are perpetual
causes of popular dissatisfaction with the administration of justice. In Pound’s words, some causes are inherent to “any system
of law” -- the application of general principles to particular cases --
and others are due to our “peculiar” Anglo-American system of law.
As
effective court leaders educate themselves about the public’s current
understanding of and satisfaction with the courts, and work to remedy poor
court performance and unfounded public perceptions, they understand that
some popular dissatisfaction is inevitable.
They work hard to remedy performance issues and unfounded public
opinions knowing that courts neither can nor should be expected to always
be popular.
Effective
court leaders avoid and keep others from falling into the trap of
believing that “they” cannot and never will understand “us.”
They communicate well with and through the media.
Court community communication often goes through a reporter and the
media as a filter and translator, but court leaders also must communicate
without reporters from the print and broadcast media.
Alternative methods include understandable courts, community
outreach, public information, community education programs, and the
Internet. Efforts to educate
are always balanced and informed by community outreach.
Court
executive leadership teams assisted at the state level and in some urban
courts by professional public information officers (PIOs) can increase
public understanding and ameliorate unduly negative public perceptions.
But the basics are the same in courts with PIOs and the vast
majority of jurisdictions without them.
Communication is grounded in the purposes and responsibilities of
courts. Positive,
well-conceived, and accurate public information and media relations are
bolstered by work toward understandable courts and community outreach.
Whatever the size of the jurisdiction, court community
communication is a court leader responsibility.
View the Summary
of Court Community Communication Curriculum Guidelines or click on
each of the six Curriculum Guidelines to see the associated Knowledge,
Skills and Abilities:
Purpose
and Communication Fundamentals
Understandable
Courts Community
Outreach Public
Information The
Media and Media Relations Leadership
and Program Management
Court
Community Communication MSWord version for printing.
(A
password window will appear. Click Cancel).
Court
Community Communication Adobe Acrobat 5.0 version for printing.
The above files are
Adobe Acrobat PDF files, and require the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to
download, view, and print. You can download the free reader here.
Contact
the webmaster
Home
|
