ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1960s, federal courts started to become deeply immersed in institutional reform litigation involving schools, prisons, mental hospitals, and other institutions. Sweeping decisions in one case after another forced states to spend large sums of money to bring institutional conditions and practices up to minimum constitutional requirements and forced administrators to extend due process, rationalize their decisions, and limit their discretion. While such judicial activism had many champions and supporters, it also generated a great deal of criticism. Some critics objected to judicial efforts to reform institutions on grounds that federal courts lacked constitutional and political authority to play this kind of role, and that federal judges had usurped the authority that properly belongs to state legislators and executive branch officials. Other critics stressed the courts' lack of competence in fixing problems rooted in inadequate resource funding and malfunctioning bureaucracies. They warned that judicial intervention was as likely to make things worse as to improve them.
