Law Commons^™

The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …

Judges In Lawyerless Courts, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark

Faculty Scholarship

The typical American civil trial court is lawyerless. In response, access to justice reformers have embraced a key intervention: changing the judge’s traditional role. The prevailing vision for judicial role reform calls on trial judges to offer a range of accommodation, assistance, and process simplification to people without legal representation.

Until now, we have known little about whether and how judges are implementing role reform recommendations or how judges behave in lawyerless courts as a general matter. Our lack of knowledge stands in stark contrast to the responsibility civil trial judges bear – and the discretionary power they wield – …

Covid, Crisis And Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark, Jessica K. Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

Our country is in crisis. The inequality and oppression that lies deep in the roots and is woven in the branches of our lives has been laid bare by a virus. Relentless state violence against black people has pushed protestors to the streets. We hope that the legislative and executive branches will respond with policy change for those who struggle the most among us: rental assistance, affordable housing, quality public education, comprehensive health and mental health care. We fear that the crisis will fade and we will return to more of the same. Whatever lies on the other side of …

The Keys To The Kingdom: Judges, Pre-Hearing Procedure, And Access To Justice, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

Judges see themselves as – and many reforming voices urge them to be – facilitators of access to justice for pro se parties in our state civil and administrative courts. Judges’ roles in pro se access to justice are inextricably linked with procedures and substantive law, yet our understanding of this relationship is limited. Do we change the rules, judicial behavior, or both to help self-represented parties? We have begun to examine this nuanced question in the courtroom, but we have not examined it in a potentially more promising context: pre-hearing motions made outside the courtroom. Outside the courtroom, judges …

Judicial Priorities, Bert I. Huang, Tejas N. Narechania

Faculty Scholarship

In an unprecedented move, the Illinois Supreme Court in the mid-1990s imposed hard caps on the state's appeals courts, drastically reducing the number of opinions they could publish, while also narrowing the formal criteria for opinions to qualify for publication. The high court explained that the amendment's purpose was to reduce the "avalanche of opinions emanating from [the] Appellate Court," which was causing legal research to become "unnecessarily burdensome, difficult and costly." This unusual and sudden policy shift offers the chance to observe the priorities of a common law court in its production of published opinions. The method we introduce …