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Municipal courts are the lowest and least scrutinized echelon of the U.S. criminal system. Largely ignored by judicial theorists, municipal governance scholarship, and criminal theory alike, these city-controlled courts operate on the intellectual sidelines; even basic public information about their dockets and operations is scarce. This Article brings municipal courts into the broader legal and scholarly conversation, offering the first comprehensive analysis of the enormous municipal court phenomenon. Nationwide, there are over 7,500 such courts in thirty states. Collectively they process over three and a half million criminal cases every year and collect at least two billion dollars in fines and fees. Created, funded, and controlled by local municipalities, these courts — sometimes referred to as “summary” or “justice” or “police” courts — are central to cities’ ability to police, to maintain public safety, and to raise revenue. At the same time, they often exhibit many of the dysfunctions for which lower courts have been generally criticized: cavalier speed, legal sloppiness, punitive harshness, and disrespectful treatment of defendants. Unlike their state counterparts, however, the U.S. Supreme Court has formally excused municipal courts from some basic legal constraints: judges need not be attorneys and may simultaneously serve as city mayors, while proceedings are often summary and not of record. These hybrid institutions thus pose thorny conceptual challenges: they are standalone judicial entities that are also arms of municipal government operating under reduced constitutional constraints as they mete out criminal convictions. As such, they create numerous tensions with modern norms of due process, judicial independence, and other traditional indicia of criminal court integrity. This Article provides a framework for appreciating the institutional complexity of this lowest tier of American criminal justice. Municipal courts deviate substantially from the classic model of courts as neutral, independent guardians of law. They are also vehicles for cities to express their political autonomy and redistribute wealth, and thus constitute underappreciated engines of local governance. As criminal adjudicators, they quietly contribute to localized mass incarceration while threatening the integrity of some foundational features of the criminal process. At the same time, they represent a potentially attractive opportunity to render criminal institutions more locally responsive. Finally, they reveal a deep dynamic at the bottom of the penal pyramid: low-status cases and institutions exert a formative influence over law itself. These complexities make reform especially challenging. There are doctrinal reforms that could strengthen municipal court operations, but they are inherently limited. The deeper reform would be to stop dismissing these courts as minor, inferior institutions and to take them and their millions of defendants seriously across the board of law, policy, and politics. Widely influential, jurisprudentially challenging, and democratically complicated, municipal courts deserve a more central place in the modern legal conversation.

Investigations in Ferguson, Missouri, revealed that many individuals, particularly Black people, entered the criminal justice system for relatively minor offenses, missed court appearances, or failure to pay fines. Municipal courts were focused on revenue generation, which led to aggressive enforcement of municipal codes. Although subsequent reforms were passed, little is known about whether and how the legislative changes influenced the law-in-action in the municipal courts. Using data from qualitative interviews with St. Louis area residents and regional court actors, as well as court observations, this article documents the legal structure of municipal courts in the region after Ferguson. We address how the parochial nature of municipal courts in St. Louis County perpetuates the financial marginalization of residents through the layering of punishment, and how the state legal structure further facilitates control, even after reform.

Probation is the most commonly imposed correctional sanction, is often accompanied by supplementary costs, and can be operated by the state or private companies. Private probation is a unique sanction used in lower courts, most often for misdemeanor offenses, and is managed by third-party actors. We focus on documenting the process and unique costs of private probation, including the rituals of compliance and proportionality of punishment. We use data from interviews with individuals on private probation and local criminal justice officials as well as evidence from court ethnographies in Georgia and Missouri. For individuals on private probation, payment of monetary sanctions is a crucial way of demonstrating compliance. Yet the financial burden of added costs for supervision and monitoring creates substantial challenges.

This paper deals with the assesment of municipal courts efficiency in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FB&H). The aim of the study is to determine difference in efficiency between municipal courts, to identify ineficient courts, and to give recommendations for improvement of the efficiency of ineficient courts. Efficiency analysis was conducted on the data obtained through primary collection directly from 31 FB&H municipal courts, for time period 2014-2016. The method used for assesment of courts efficiency is Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The paper gives a brief theoretical overview of the DEA method, a review of the DEA literature related to the efficiency assessment of the courts in the world, and the comparison of the methodologies used in the reviewed studies with the methodology used in this study. The results of the DEA analysis were used to identify the most efficient, as well as ineficient courts, and to identify potentials for improvement of courts efficiency. Suggestions for improvement of the data collection system related to the work of the courts are given in this paper in order to increase the relevance of the analysis. Comparison of the courts efficiency and ranking of the courts are performed according to the courts efficiency in 2014, 2015 and 2016, and an aggregate for three-year period 2014-2016. Based on the estimated efficiency, a projection of increased number of resolved cases has been estimated, provided that all courts are efficient.

[...] funding is being cut from budgets that previously consumed less than 1 percent of the state budget.8 Further tightening of court financial resources therefore cuts into the bone, threatening fundamental liberties and undermining a system that provides courts to hear the redress of people. According to National Center for State Courts, from 2009 through 2012 46 state governments face projected budget deficits amounting to $601 billion.

Passenger screening is an important component of aviation security that incorporates real-time passenger screening strategies designed to maximize effectiveness in identifying potential terrorist attacks. This paper identifies a methodology that can be used to sequentially and optimally assign passengers to aviation security resources. An automated prescreening system determines passengers' perceived risk levels, which become known as passengers check in. The levels are available for determining security class assignments sequentially as passengers enter security screening. A passenger is then assigned to one of several available security classes, each of which corresponds to a particular set of screening devices. The objective is to use the passengers' perceived risk levels to determine the optimal policy for passenger screening assignments that maximize the expected total security, subject to capacity and assignment constraints. The sequential passenger assignment problem is formulated as a Markov decision process, and an optimal policy is found using dynamic programming. The general result from the sequential stochastic assignment problem is adapted to provide a heuristic for assigning passengers to security classes in real time. A condition is provided under which this heuristic yields the optimal policy. The model is illustrated with an example that incorporates data extracted from the Official Airline Guide (Official Airline Guide. 1998. OAG Business Travel Planner: North American Edition . Official Airline Guides, Bedfordshire, UK).