Jake Dear, the Supreme Court’s chief supervising attorney, has written about how a severely overburdened court first used staff to deal with its backlog. The article is now available on SSRN and will be published in an upcoming volume of California Legal History, the journal of the California Supreme Court Historical Society. An abbreviated version will appear in the Society’s Review. [Disclosures: I reviewed and commented on drafts of the article, as did Horvitz & Levy’s Beth Jay. Also, I serve on the Society’s board of directors.]
The article contains a detailed history of the court during the 20-year period — starting in the late 19th century — when it hired commissioners to help with the caseload. Unlike the court’s current anonymous staff attorneys, the commissioners signed opinions they drafted, which were often published in the official reports after being adopted by the justices. The commissioner system was regularly criticized and, after it survived a constitutional challenge brought by an attorney who had been on the losing end of three commissioner opinions, disenchantment with the system eventually led to creation of the Courts of Appeal.
It’s a great read.