The role of specialty courts Specialty courts are a big thing in the United States. They are a problem solving oriented court that are narrowly focused on within the jurisdiction. At first these types of courts were called designer courts or boutique courts which indicated the special nature of the court. Drug courts were made due to the amount of drug addicts that were going into jail or prison rather than treatment. Since then there are 3,000 drug courts in the United State, and then in addition there are 1,125 other problem solving courts such as mental health courts, gun courts, truancy courts, domestic violence courts etc (Neubauer).
Many of these specialized courts rely and function off of the therapeutic jurisdiction. Therefore, that means they follow 5 essential elements that include:
Immediate intervention
Non Adversarial adjudication
Hands-on judicial involvement
Treatment programs with clear rules and structured goals
A team approach that brings together the judge, prosecutors, defense counsel,
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Some of these advantages include: judicial system efficiency, legal system efficiency, uniformity, expertise, improved case management, elimination of conflict and forum shopping, increase system of flexibility, administrative agency review mechanism, and consistency of administrative agency law(Zimmer). All of these make the speciality courts advantages. By having improved case management is really an advantage due to the fact the judge is an expertise on the subject matter, therefore it's easier on the judge to handle it's cases. On the counterpart, there are some disadvantages to speciality courts. The disadvantages are: inefficiency, judicial isolation, quality of judges, and public access(Zimmer). With judicial isolation it risk the likelihood of judges having a one sided view due to the fact they are more of specialist type of judge rather than a generalist