Fordham Urban Law Journal Volume 29 Number 1 Conference - Revolutions Within Article 6 Communities: The Fifth Annual Domestic Violence Conference 2001 A Precept of Managerial Responsibility: Securing Collective Justice in Instituational Reform Litigation Anthony M. Bertelli Laurence E. Lynn Jr. Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj Part of the Administrative Law Commons Recommended Citation Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn Jr., A Precept of Managerial Responsibility: Securing Collective Justice in Instituational Reform Litigation, 29 Fordham Urb. L.J. 317 (2001). Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol29/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by FLASH: The orF dham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fordham Urban Law Journal by an authorized editor of FLASH: The orF dham Law Archive of Scholarship and History. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A Precept of Managerial Responsibility: Securing Collective Justice in Instituational Reform Litigation Cover Page Footnote Anthony M. Bertelli is an assistant professor at the James W. Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. is the Sidney Stein, Jr. Professor of Public Management at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the school of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. The uthora s gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Phillip Cooper, Colin Diver, Craig Levine, David Rosenbloom, Ellen Schall, and Charles Wine. This article is available in Fordham Urban Law Journal: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol29/iss1/6 A PRECEPT OF MANAGERIAL RESPONSIBILITY: SECURING COLLECTIVE JUSTICE IN INSTITUTIONAL REFORM LITIGATION By Anthony M. Bertelli and Laurence E. Lynn, Jr.* Institutional reform litigation confronts public administrators with troubling dilemmas. Plaintiffs routinely accuse public officials of violating their constitutional rights.' Federal judges order offi- cials to make sweeping changes to their agencies.2 Of course, sometimes, as-with the school desegregation cases,3 federal courts have had no choice but to be heavy-handed4 with public officials. Yet court directives often contradict the duties and responsibilities of public managers. The argument for judicial intervention is rarely straightforward. * Anthony M. Bertelli is an assistant professor at the James W. Martin School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Kentucky. Laurence E. Lynn, Jr. is the Sidney Stein, Jr. Professor of Public Management at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and the School of Social Service Adminis- tration at the University of Chicago. The authors gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Phillip Cooper, Colin Diver, Craig Levine, David Rosenbloom, Ellen Schall, and Charles Wise. 1. See, e.g., Hutto v. Finney, 437 U.S. 678, 681 (1978) (alleging that conditions of Arkansas prisons violated the Eighth and Fourteenth amendments); Hills v. Gatreaux, 425 U.S. 284, 287 (1976) (alleging violations of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Chicago Housing Authority in intentionally allocating housing in a discriminatory manner). 2. See Hutto, 437 U.S. at 686-88 (upholding the trial court's remedial order im- posing new standards on the state's use of solitary confinement); Hills, 425 U.S. at 299 (ordering the agencies to create housing alternatives beyond the city limits of Chicago). 3. See, e.g., Goss v. Board of Education, 373 U.S. 683, 689 (1963) (invalidating "one-way transfers," allowing students to transfer to schools in which they belonged to a racial majority group); Green v. County School Board, 391 U.S. 430, 441-42 (1968) (invalidating a similar "freedom of choice" provision). 4. We acknowledge that "heavy-handedness" on the part of the trial judge may be the result of the particularities of the case. Parties often ask the judge to make orders when they are unable to come to a resolution, and appellate decisions may confine judges to a set of orders that are not what even they consider remedially adequate. See, e.g., PHILLIP J. COOPER, HARD JUDICIAL CHOICES 105-35 (1988); Judith Resnik, Managerial Judges, 96 HARV. L. REV. 374, 394-95 (1982). FORDHAM URBAN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. XXIX Consider the case of Marisol A. v. Guiliani.5 The case was filed in the Southern District of New York in 1995, shortly after the widely publicized death of Eliza Izquierdo. New York City Child Welfare Administration ("CWA") officials had placed Izquierdo, a six-year old child, in foster care. The CWA later returned Iz- quierdo to her mother. Despite receiving numerous reports of the mother's subsequent abuse, CWA took no further action on Iz- quierdo's file. Izquierdo was subsequently beaten to death by her mother. Catalyzed by Izquierdo's death, children's rights advo- cates sued CWA, claiming the agency failed to protect children at risk of being placed in foster homes. The lawsuit was based on various New York and federal statutes6 and the New York and fed- eral constitutions.7 Four weeks after the Marisol complaint was filed, Mayor Ru- dolph W. Guiliani announced his own program to reform the City's child welfare program: Following the shocking death of Elisa Izquierdo, a child under the protection of the City's Child Welfare Administration, New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani initiated a sharp departure from the status quo. He separated the child welfare administra- tion from the Human Resources Administration and created, by Executive Order No. 26 in January 1996, a new agency, [Admin- istration for Children's Services ("ACS)"], that would report di- rectly to him rather than through a deputy mayor, as is the case with other cabinet departments. To head the new agency, the Mayor appointed Nicholas Scoppetta as Commissioner and promised him the full financial and operational support of his administration. These moves were intended to insure that "bus- iness as usual" in child welfare services could not continue in New York City.8 5. Marisol v. Guiliani, 929 F. Supp. 662 (S.D.N.Y. 1996). 6. The plaintiffs' statutory claims included violations of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980, 42 U.S.C. §§ 620-628, 670-679a (2001); the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, 42 U.S.C. § 5151-06a (2001); the Medicare Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1396(a), 1396(d)(A), 1396(d)(R); the Americans With Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. § 12101; § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, 29 U.S.C. §§ 794, 794a (2001); Articles 2, 3, 6, and 7 of the New York Social Services Law; Articles 6 and 10 of the New York State Family Court Act, N.Y. Fam. Ct. Act §§ 611, 1011 (McKinney 1999); and New York State Administrative Regulations at N.Y. Comp. Codes R. & Regs., tit. 18, § 400-484 (2001). 7. The plaintiffs' constitutional claims included violations of the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and violation of Article XVII of the New York State Constitution. 8. LAURENCE E. LYNN, JR., THE MANAGEMENT OF THE ADMINISTRATION FOR CHILDREN'S SERVICES (ACS): AN ASSESSMENT 9 (1998). 2001] INSTITUTIONAL REFORM LITIGATION 319 Marisol v. Guilianiwas ultimately settled without a provision for federal court oversight. The judge only required that a panel of national experts review the agency's reform efforts for two years.9 If within that time, ACS made good faith efforts towards reforming its operation, the lawsuit would not be reinstated."0 The case raises a larger question. Should a state's interest in the exercise of managerial discretion on behalf of legislated goals weigh in a court's determination if a human services agency has violated constitutional rights?11 Under what circumstances should federal courts allow public administrators to manage their own agencies? How should state and local public administrators answer for their performance so as to justify this judicial restraint? We argue that federal courts should refuse to hear institutional reform cases not only when federal court intervention would upset a state administrative scheme (the traditional Burford abstention doctrine), z but also when the institutional defendant is governed by a precept of managerial responsibility.3 When the agency's challenged actions have comported with this precept, we urge fed- eral courts to let their state counterparts determine the agency's managerial responsibility in a common law process. The analysis begins, in Part I, by addressing the Burford absten- tion arguments in the Marisol case itself. In Part II, we turn to the application of abstention doctrines to institutional reform litigation 9. Rachel Swarns, Guiliani Agrees to Independent Oversight of Child Welfare Agency, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 2, 1998, at Al. 10. Id. 11. In some ways, the question has been squarelyaddressed. The United States Supreme Court has dealt with this difficult question in the context of prison detention methods in Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 540 (1979): The Government ...has legitimate interests that stem from its need to man- age the facility in which the individual is detained .... For example, the Government must be able to take steps to maintain security and order at the institution and make certain no weapons or illicit drugs reach detainees. Re- straints that are reasonably related to the institution's interest in maintaining jail security do not, without more, constitute unconstitutional punishment .... In this article, we provide a generalized "attempt to detail the precise extent of the legitimate governmental interests" of public human service agencies. 12. The Burford doctrine, formulated in Burford v. Sun Oil Co., 319 U.S. 315, 318 (1943), is a doctrine of abstention where "federal courts have refrained from interfer- ing with complex state regulatory schemes." BLACK'S LAW DICTIONARY 197 (6th ed.