350
Opinion of the Court
Of course, the two roles briefly and partially coincide when a court, in granting relief against actual harm that has been suffered, or that will imminently be suffered, by a particular individual or class of individuals, orders the alteration of an institutional organization or procedure that causes the harm. But the distinction between the two roles would be obliterated if, to invoke intervention of the courts, no actual or imminent harm were needed, but merely the status of being subject to a governmental institution that was not organized or managed properly. If—to take another example from prison life—a healthy inmate who had suffered no deprivation of needed medical treatment were able to claim violation of his constitutional right to medical care, see Estelle v. Gamble, 429 U. S. 97, 103 (1976), simply on the ground that the prison medical facilities were inadequate, the essential distinction between judge and executive would have disappeared: it would have become the function of the courts to assure adequate medical care in prisons.
The foregoing analysis would not be pertinent here if, as respondents seem to assume, the right at issue—the right to which the actual or threatened harm must pertain—were the right to a law library or to legal assistance. But Bounds established no such right, any more than Estelle established a right to a prison hospital. The right that Bounds acknowledged was the (already well-established) right of access to the courts. E. g., Bounds, 430 U. S., at 817, 821, 828. In the cases to which Bounds traced its roots, we had protected that right by prohibiting state prison officials from actively interfering with inmates' attempts to prepare legal documents, e. g., Johnson v. Avery, 393 U. S. 483, 484, 489- 490 (1969), or file them, e. g., Ex parte Hull, 312 U. S. 546, 547-549 (1941), and by requiring state courts to waive filing fees, e. g., Burns v. Ohio, 360 U. S. 252, 258 (1959), or transcript fees, e. g., Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S. 12, 19 (1956), for indigent inmates. Bounds focused on the same entitlement of access to the courts. Although it affirmed a court order
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