Vol. 35 No. 02 (October 2025) pp. 14-16COURTS UNMASKED:CIVIL LEGAL SYSTEM REFORM AND COVID-19, Alyx Mark. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2025. 200pp. Cloth $69.99. ISBN: 9780700638253. Paper $24.99. ISBN: 9780700638260. E-Book $24.99. ISBN: 9780700638277.
Reviewed by Shane A. Gleason Public Policy & Law Program, Trinity College. Email: shane.gleason@trincoll.edu.
Alyx Mark’s Courts Unmasked: Civil Legal System Reform and COVID-19 begins with a seemingly simple research question: How did state courts respond to COVID-19? In answering this question, Mark moves beyond judicial politics’ historical outcomes and justice-vote focus. Rather, she draws on the judicial administration literature to focus on how the pandemic altered the civil legal system. The substantive analysis explores a plethora of legal actors ranging from local court administrators to state supreme courts. The result is a rich and multifaceted account of not only how courts responded to the pandemic, but also the institutional constraints, processes, and perceptions that led there. The mixed-method analysis occurs at both a sweeping state and nuanced local level. Ultimately, Mark presents a compelling narrative that is about far more than the pandemic; it is about how state supreme courts direct their local courts, how courts respond to changing contexts, and rich institutional variation between court systems. This book should become essential reading for anyone interested in state courts specifically or the operation of legal institutions broadly.
Using the pandemic as a vehicle for analysis, Mark explores civil legal system reform through a twofold framework. First, she argues state supreme court directives to their inferior courts during the pandemic are a function of how centralized judicial administration is in the state. This may be the difference between a state supreme court telling a lower court what to do or encouraging them to do something. Second, Mark explores how local legal actors perceive those directives and the extent to which they comply with apex court directives. While the degree of centralization certainly matters in local response, so too does the local context and the extent to which lower court actors feel buy-in with the high court’s process. While the theoretical framework is itself quite parsimonious, it underscores institutional variation between states is more complex than the presence of an intermediate court of appeals, selection mechanism, professionalism, or any other institutional feature highlighted in previous work. Rather, by drawing together scholarship from the hereunto disparate fields of judicial politics and judicial administration, Mark demonstrates institutional variation occurs on a myriad of levels which are consequential for courts’ operation.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this book, and one that should be more prominent, is the scope of the data. Within judicial politics data is often conceived of as opinions or perhaps briefs. Mark focuses on the administrative process. This results in multi-modal data including a quantitative measure of court administrative centralization, a corpus of all court orders introduced in the first year of the pandemic, a focused comprehensive list of orders and considered orders on technology from the pandemic until 2023, and over 50 interviews with a variety of state court actors in three states. This data is particularly noteworthy given how difficult state court data collection is as a matter of course, particularly below the state supreme court level. This data can surely serve as a launching pad for future research. Indeed, in the concluding chapter Mark highlights an extensive array of future projects that could build on the analyses in this book. She also generously provides much of the data on her website (Mark, 2025b) which will be a boon for future scholars
The first chapter explores state courts’ varied administrative structures. Whereas judicial politics scholars can typically take hierarchy and precedent as a powerful predictor of outcomes, the same does not necessarily hold for court administration. Indeed, court administrators are not even necessarily jurists. This brief chapter paints a vivid picture of how courts operate as part of a broader state judiciary. This chapter also has utility beyond the broader book project; it is an excellent primer for scholars versed in judicial politics rather than judicial administration. It could also serve as a stand-alone reading for an advanced undergraduate course to underscore the multitude of ways state court systems vary.
With the general framework laid in Chapter 1, Mark moves onto discussing courts’ initial response to the pandemic in Chapter 2. Some state supreme courts issued mandates to their inferior courts; others issued guidance. A court’s propensity to issue one or the other depends on the extent to which it has centralized control over local court actors. In order to measure centralization, Mark draws on a 2016 survey of court administrators to create state-level administrative centralization scores. She does, however, note it is difficult to reduce state centralization to just one measure. Thus, she develops eight separate factors. She opts to focus on one, the adoption of new technology. The other seven are intriguing and represent an avenue for future work. With this quantitative metric in hand, Mark is able to divide states into centralized and decentralized categories. The creation of this metric is then followed by a thematic analysis on all orders issued in the first four months of the pandemic. From this analysis, she provides multiple examples of state responses. This analysis gives concrete examples to illustrate both the centralization measure and the main theoretical thrust of the book. This is exemplified by the remarkably detailed Table 2.2., ultimately concludes that a singular measure of centralization may not be sufficiently nuanced for all the ways in which state supreme courts responded to COVID.
In Chapter 3, perhaps the most impressive chapter, Mark examines local court actors’ response to their respective state-wide directives. Much of the explanation comes down to perception: do local court officials perceive they have discretionary room to deviate from state directives even in a centralized state? While this seemingly resembles a principal-agent model, Mark stresses it is actually an integrative model. It is not that local officials perceive the risk of monitoring and then strategically decide to shirk, rather it is critical to also include local conditions in order to predict behavior. Mark demonstrates this with 58 interviews with local court officials in three states. Mark notes that in centralized states (which one of her states is) local court actors generally appreciate a uniform approach to the judiciary. However, critically, she notes that those same actors note instances of deviation that occur because of a “mismatch between local conditions and high court directives.” By contrast, local officials in decentralized states are aware of resource differences between jurisdictions and recognize the key role of flexibility in meeting local needs. Mark makes her argument vivid via extended excerpts from her interviews. They do a wonderful job of making her theory come to life and highlight several promising avenues for future research. Chief among these, I think, is the idea of political cover. Here, Mark highlights how falling back on state supreme court orders can be used as an “excuse” to make what they see as a needed change while avoiding local blowback.
If the second and third chapters focus on the immediate effects of the pandemic, Chapter 4 takes the long view by shifting focus to the lasting impact of the pandemic on court operations. Herein Mark focuses on technological changes. While it is intuitive that in the wake of the pandemic courts would update old rules around remote hearings from “telephone” to “teleconference,” Mark highlights this process was complex and followed many of the same processes as she observed in the second chapter. Here again, there are differences between states based on structure; centralized states tend to make rules about how local officials implement rules. Whereas decentralized states tend to frame their orders as suggestions or guidance. However, Mark highlights an important feature of civil legal system reform in non-emergency settings: state supreme courts tend to consult external actors or decision-makers. While precisely who gets consulted varies by state, Mark notes court administrators are more likely to support directives when they feel included in the rulemaking process. This observation, which deserves more coverage, could surely be a source for several future studies. Moreover, it adds additional complexity to the nuances of court administration during the pandemic and beyond.
Mark’s book, at first glance, seemingly explores how courts responded to a single cataclysmic event. Yet, in exploring this moment, Mark makes several key contributions to the field. Perhaps the biggest contribution exists on both the theoretical and practical level: she sheds light on how state court systems vary in terms of their centralization and thus operation. This has numerous possible future applications. Indeed, the points above where I expressed a desire for more information are not critiques of Mark’s work. Rather, they are evidence of this book’s promise as a springboard for future work.
REFERENCES:
Mark, Alyx. 2025b. “State Courts and COVID Document Archive @ Wesleyan University.” [website], https://www.alyxmark.com/document-archive.
© Copyright 2025 by author, Shane A. Gleason.
