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Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter
Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …
Targeting Poverty In The Courts: Improving The Measurement Of Ability To Pay, Meghan M. O'Neil, Jj Prescott
Targeting Poverty In The Courts: Improving The Measurement Of Ability To Pay, Meghan M. O'Neil, Jj Prescott
Law & Economics Working Papers
Ability-to-pay determinations are essential when governments use money-based alternative sanctions, like fines, to enforce laws. One longstanding difficulty in the U.S. has been the extreme lack of guidance on how courts are to determine a litigant’s ability to pay. The result has been a seat-of-the-pants approach that is inefficient and inaccurate, and, as a consequence, very socially costly. Fortunately, online platform technology presents a promising avenue for reform. In particular, platform technology offers the potential to increase litigant access, reduce costs, and ensure consistent and fair treatment—all of which should lead to more accurate sanctions. We use interviews, surveys, and …
Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter
Simplified Courts Can't Solve Inequality, Colleen F. Shanahan, Anna E. Carpenter
Faculty Scholarship
State civil courts struggle to handle the volume of cases before them. Litigants in these courts, most of whom are unrepresented, struggle to navigate the courts to solve their problems. This access-to-justice crisis has led to a range of reform efforts and solutions. One type of reform, court simplification, strives to reduce the complexity of procedures and information used by courts to help unrepresented litigants navigate the judicial system. These reforms mitigate but do not solve the symptoms of the larger underlying problem: state civil courts are struggling because they have been stuck with legal cases that arise from the …
Integrating The Access To Justice Movement, Lauren Sudeall
Integrating The Access To Justice Movement, Lauren Sudeall
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Last fall, advocates of social change came together at the A2J Summit at Fordham University School of Law and discussed how to galvanize a national access to justice movement - who would it include, and what would or should it attempt to achieve? One important preliminary question we tackled was how such a movement would define "justice," and whether it would apply only to the civil justice system. Although the phrase "access to justice" is not exclusively civil in nature, more often than not it is taken to have that connotation. Lost in the interpretation is an opportunity to engage …