Accepted for publication in the Ohio State Journal on Dispute Resolution (OSU JDR), Volume 42, Fall 2026

The rise of managerial judging in criminal procedure over the past two decades has fundamentally transformed the adversarial model of adjudication, reshaping the judge’s role from a neutral arbiter into an active case manager. Under this model, courts now proactively facilitate, endorse, encourage, and mediate guilty pleas in pursuit of efficiency. While managerial imperatives have begun to take root in several U.S. states, this article highlights a critical concern that judicial regulation has yet to address – the bureaucratization of the criminal process.

Scholars have long raised concerns about judicial involvement in plea bargaining and the demise of the adversarial trial. However, as this article argues, managerialism does not necessarily erode the adversarial framework. By grounding managerial-led guilty pleas on the adversarial principles of liberty and consent, it merely exacerbates longstanding risks within plea-bargaining, such as wrongful convictions, coercion, pressures to plead, and prosecutorial dominance – all contributing to the current mass discriminatory incarceration system. While scholars have offered to utilize managerial tools and judicial regulation to mitigate prosecutorial dominance and ensure evidentiary sufficiency, the article argues that the broader shift toward bureaucratic case management, with efficiency as an overarching objective, displaces the adversarial ideal of autonomy and meaningful participation. The rise of virtual guilty pleas further amplifies this problem by severing defendants from the courtroom process and detaching plea decisions from the trial’s retributive function.

Given that the criminal trial serves not merely as a mechanism for case disposal but as a process that holds defendants to account, guilty pleas must be genuine, sincere, and voluntary, not mere products of a bureaucratic system. Ultimately, while managerialism preserves the adversarial process in form, its bureaucratic nature transforms the trial from a forum for accountability into an administrative mechanism designed for swift convictions.