It would be fair to say that scholars of law and courts have not paid sufficient attention to trial courts. A bias exists toward studying courts at the federal level, though only a small body of research even examines federal trial courts (i.e., U.S. District Courts). Moreover, those who study courts at the state level typically focus on state courts of last resort. Brian J. Ostrom and his colleagues have produced an important contribution on the topic of state trial courts. The authors focus on a concept that should be of general interest to law and courts scholars: court culture. By culture, they mean “the espoused values (i.e., the values that shape why an organization acts in a particular way) and basic assumptions (i.e., jointly learned values, beliefs, and assumptions that become shared and taken for granted in an organization) that shape the way work gets done in an organization” (p. 4). The book's goals are to conceptualize and measure culture, assess its consequences for court performance, and ascertain what type of culture trial court personnel ideally prefer.

Chapter 2 presents a framework for studying court culture. Ostrom et al. are influenced by extant frameworks (from public administration) of organizational culture, which posit two dimensions underlying culture. The first is sociability, which represents the degree to which friendships and social networks emerge among personnel in an organization. The second dimension is solidarity, which entails a shared sense of the organization's mission and a task-oriented work ethic geared toward getting the job done. Inspired by this framework, the authors estimate a multidimensional scaling model on survey data that corroborates extant frameworks of culture. Trial court culture consists of two dimensions: sociability and solidarity. When these dimensions are crossed, four types of culture emerge. Communal culture (high sociability, low solidarity) is characterized by judges and administrators having a decentralized, collegial environment with flexible management procedures. Networked culture (high sociability, high solidarity) is marked by a shared sense of the court's mission, but management style is flexible and collegial. Autonomous culture (low sociability, low solidarity) is characterized as giving judges and administrators sufficient discretion and independence to execute their duties as they deem fit. Finally, hierarchical culture (low sociability, high solidarity) is an institutionalized culture consisting of strong standard-operating procedures and a strict chain of command.

The goal of Chapter 3 is to measure court culture. To execute this task, the authors surveyed judges, lawyers, and administrators in 12 trial courts in three different states (California, Florida, and Minnesota). The authors sought to measure culture in five different areas: case management, judge–staff relations, change management, courthouse leadership, and internal organization. Results are presented graphically using “culture kites,” which intuitively plot the mean responses of personnel in two-dimensional space. Substantively, the authors use the evidence to challenge the conventional wisdom that most trial courts are autonomous. Meaningful variation in culture exists between courts. Also, variation exists within courts on the type of culture that marks the five work areas, leading the authors to conclude that some courts pursue competing values across areas. Chapter 4 elaborates on the four cultures and presents an explication of how each culture has implications for the five work areas.

An important contribution is provided in Chapter 5, which analyzes the consequences of court culture for court performance. Two aspects of performance are examined: 1) the timeliness of resolving cases, and 2) perceptions of access, fairness, and effectiveness. The authors rely on various surveys and posit some hypotheses for the impact of culture on these performance dimensions. They find that hierarchical cultures maximize timeliness, followed by networked, autonomous, and communal cultures. In terms of access, fairness, and effectiveness, the findings are less straightforward. Prosecutors and public defenders rate hierarchical cultures rather low on this dimension, with autonomous cultures being rated higher than hierarchical ones. Prosecutors prefer cultures with strong solidarity over cultures with high sociability, while public defenders favor sociability, and in particular communal cultures. Overall, the findings suggest that court culture exhibits significant effects on court performance. The results also highlight a challenge facing trial courts in terms of trying to meet the conflicting preferences of different personnel.

Finally, Chapter 6 explores the type of culture that court personnel would most prefer. Results indicate that judges and administrators prefer different cultures for different work areas. For leadership, a communal culture is preferred. People prefer a hierarchical case-management style and change management. For judge–staff relations and internal organization, a networked culture is ideal. It is interesting to note that judges and administrators do not strive for autonomous cultures.

A potential long-term contribution of this work may be in the application of the culture concept to courts at other levels. For courts that are most studied by law and courts scholars, one can certainly imagine that cultural variation exists between courts in general and within courts across various work areas. This cultural variation might have some consequences not only for court performance but for decision making as well. The authors' two-dimensional framework gives scholars a foundation for the study of court culture at other levels. Linking solidarity and sociability—or other dimensions that scholars think of—to the ways in which judges make decisions seems like an interesting and important research idea, and positing a theoretical framework for this link seems plausible.

With any large-scale project like this one, there are always quibbles that can be raised. I raise two general criticisms here, neither of which signal any fatal flaws. First, the authors could have connected the concept of court culture more closely to an institutionalist perspective. They are essentially telling an institutionalist story about trial courts. Culture represents a set of formal and informal institutional arrangements that have a direct bearing on a court's performance. Of course, institutionalist perspectives stress how the “rules of the game” (including both formal rules and informal norms) structure and influence the way an organization does its work. So there are connections between the authors' story about culture and institutionalist theories that I wish they would have made. These links could have pushed Ostrom et al. to think some more about the theoretical setup of the book and to motivate additional testable hypotheses.

My second general criticism surrounds some of the empirical analyses. Particularly in Chapter 5, the authors could have employed more rigorous data analysis procedures. In looking at the effects of culture on timeliness, for instance, they rely on descriptive statistics to communicate which cultures promote timeliness the most. I think it would have been instructive to communicate whether there are statistically significant differences among these cultures. Moreover, one can think of certain variables that should be controlled for in order to be confident that the findings are not spurious. For instance, I would want to see the effects of culture when controlling for court size. The same criticism can be applied to the analysis of culture's effect on access, fairness, and management. The findings would have contained more validity if the authors had presented models that controlled for additional variables.

In the grand scheme of things, these criticisms are relatively minor. The book is well written and argued, and it presents original empirical evidence. I think anyone who reads the book will find it an interesting and important contribution to the work on trial courts in particular, as well as to the notion that cultural variation across courts has consequences for court performance and outputs.