David B. Rottman, Ph.D. retired in early 2020 from the Research Division of the National Center for State Courts after 33 years of service. His research focuses on core issues of importance for the courts, such as the factors underlying public trust in the courts, the potential for durable and effective court and community collaborations, the application to the courts of procedural justice principles, the effectiveness of innovations such as community courts, methods for trial court organization, best practices in conducting judicial evaluations, and effective judicial branch leadership.

He is the author of over 70 published articles and dozens of research reports on key topics relevant to the state court community. His publications appear in periodicals such as The Court Manager, Court Review, Judicature, Justice System Journal, Law & Policy,  Dr. Rottman frequently speaks at conferences organized by major court organization such as AJA and NACM and to conferences of professional groups such as the American Society of Criminology and the Law & Society Association.  He provides technical assistance and training to individual courts and to state court systems within his areas of expertise. A constant feature of his work is a desire to help judges understand relevant developments in the sciences and to help academic researchers understand the realities within which courts operate.

His research led to preparing a Guide to Court and Community Collaboration and evaluated the Midtown Community Court and the Red Hook Community Justice Center. Recently, he participated in a project creating a toolkit for building collaboration between courts and minority communities.

Concern over public trust in the courts led to the design of three national surveys and a California statewide surveys. is another strand to his work. He led the design of the “How the Public Views the State Courts” survey (1999), the “Perceptions of the Courts in Your Community: The Influence of Experience, Race, and Ethnicity,”(2000) and, on behalf of the California Judicial Council for the Trust and Confidence in the California Courts: A Survey of the Public and Attorneys survey (2005).

Procedural Justice principles underly his approach to understanding problems like effective collaborations, public trust, problem-solving courts, and judicial performance evaluation. Dr. Rottman is a co-founder of the website www.proceduralfairness.org (with Hon. Kevin Burke, Hon. Steve Leben (Ret.), and Yale Law Professor Tom Tyler).

Judicial leadership is a recent area of concentration. Dr. Rottman directed the Executive Session on State Court Leadership in the 21^st Century project, a joint endeavor of the Kennedy School of Government and NCSC. He was one of the key NCSC staff preparing the Judicial Branch Leadership Academy held in October 2019.

He was a co-convener of an international workshop on Evaluating Judicial Performance held in Oñati, Spain) and was a co-principle investigator of an Australian Research Council discovery grant led by Flinders University.

Dr. Rottman earned a Ph.D. in Sociology with a specialty in organizational studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana. His career as a researcher began in the Republic of Ireland at the Economic and Social Research Institute. He was appointed by the Irish Government to serve on official inquiries into the prison system and, separately, the nation’s social welfare system. He was elected to the Criminological Scientific Committee of the Council of Europe. Rottman has taught at the National University of Ireland and as a visiting associate professor at the University of Connecticut.