# Receivership **Status: stub — expand.** The remedy in which a court removes operational control of an institution from the party that holds it and vests it in a court-appointed outsider. In the structural-reform context it is the end of a ladder that begins with an injunction, passes through a consent decree and a monitor, and arrives here only when the defendant has demonstrated over years that it will not comply. The distinguishing feature is that it does **not** depend on the defendant's cooperation. Every contempt sanction asks the defendant to act; a receiver acts instead of the defendant. [[Federal Rules of Civil Procedure]] Rule 70(a) is the general-purpose version — the court may direct that a required act be performed by another person at the disobedient party's expense. The modern federal examples are all **state or municipal** institutions: prisons, jails, child-welfare systems, public housing. **No federal agency has been placed in receivership**, where the coequal-branch objection would arise for the first time. A near relative, used where full control transfer is too blunt, is the court-appointed **monitor** or **remediation manager**: an outsider with reporting and sometimes decision authority inside the institution, reporting to the judge rather than to the institution's own executive. ## See also - [[How a Federal Court Order Is Enforced]] · [[Nunez v. City of New York]] - [[Federal Rules of Civil Procedure]] · [[Contempt of Court]]