We found that administrators attempted to maintain their organizational boundaries by: (1) controlling information, (2) using political connections in the broader community, (3) launching a judicial counterattack, and (4) exercising administrative perogatives. Defiance of demands from the broader legal community was related to (1) the organizational culture of the Texas prison system, which developed and existed in isolation not only from the Federal courts but also from oversight by state officials; (2) pronouncements by the prison system's leadership that created a moral climate in which court-ordered reform could be readily defined by prison staff as illegitimate; and (3) effective control structures within the system that failed to respond to violations of the law by prison staff. Keeping the limitations of a single case study in mind, we close with a set of observations for addressing court-ordered organizational reform in a comparative framework. (Publisher abstract)