The Ohio Judicial Council: Studies and Reports

On April 6,1923, the Ohio legislature passed an act creating a Judicial Council charged with making a continuous study of the organization, rules, and methods of practice of the courts of that state, the work accomplished, and the results produced by the judicial system and its various parts. Hampered by a lack of funds during its first years of life, this body seemed destined to languish and waste away. In 1929, however, all was changed, for in that year the Council succeeded in arranging with the Institute of Law of the Johns Hopkins University for a three-year study of judicial administration in Ohio. This survey, which represented the first of a series of state-wide studies of “law-in-action” contemplated by the Institute of Law, proposed not only to organize technical research in connection with the actual operation of the courts, but to go beyond this and look into causes and effects of law administration in the social process. More specifically, it proposed, among other things: (1) to study the trends of litigation and ascertain its human causes and effects; (2) to study the machinery and functioning of the various agencies and offices which directly or indirectly have to do with the administration of law; (3) to locate precisely and definitely the reasons for delays, expenses, and uncertainty in litigation; (4) to institute a permanent system of judicial records and statistics which would automatically provide information now secured only after great labor; (5) to detect the points at which changes in substantive law would contribute markedly to social justice; and (6) to consider the results of the aforesaid analyses and make recommendations based thereon.