Organizational Analysis

That every legal system has recourse to some organizational structures in discharging its functions is quite evident. The nature of the organizational structures of courts, legislatures, administrative agencies, and enforcement agencies helps determine the kinds of legal norms that develop, the type of interpretation and enforcement of norms, and, in short, the impact of legal norms on people's behavior.

The organizational-analysis approach is illustrated in the essay by Evan on the legal structure of public and private organizations. Attention is drawn to analogous structures and functions in public and private legal systems, which, in turn, point to potential interrelationships among them and to their consequences for the growth and transformation of law.

The interplay between changes in legal doctrines and changes in organizational structure is analyzed by Blumrosen in an essay on labor law. As trade unions have grown more powerful in comparison with employers, their legal status has changed from that of a criminal conspiracy in the early nineteenth century to that of a legally equal party in collective bargaining relations in this century.

The courts, in fashioning common law with respect to the employment relationship, were prone to restrict the right of workers to organize into trade unions; legislatures, on the other hand, more responsive to the pressures from labor, slowly moved in the direction of institutionalizing the right of union organization. If the jury is viewed as an organizational subunit of the structure of the court, these studies, and possibly others stemming from this Project, may be interpreted in terms of the impact of extraorganizational statuses and values on the behavior of individuals in such social structures.