ABA Committee Says Civil Justice System is Broken
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The civil courts, according to Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson, have been “taken over by institutional interests — the debt collectors and the landlords — and that has had a profound effect. It has taken over the docket and there is no room for the kinds of disputes that common people have.”
That sentiment was echoed by Hannah Lieberman, an associate dean for the David A. Clarke School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia, who said the system is in dire need of change because studies show that very little adjudication occurs in civil court cases. “These cases are rife with procedural problems that mean a lot of litigants never get a meaningful opportunity to be heard and where results are frequently contrary to the interest of justice,” Lieberman says.
The report looked at 1 million civil cases in the U.S. and the results were “surprising,” Balmer said. For starters, debt collection (39 percent), landlord/tenant (27 percent) and foreclosures (17 percent) dominated the case load of these courts. The takeaways from the survey of the landscape of civil litigation in state courts were that:
- Tort cases have largely evaporated
- In the vast majority of cases, the amount at stake is small (but still very important to the parties)
- For most litigants, the costs of litigating greatly exceed the monetary value of the case ($4,000 median judgment)
- Most cases are disposed through a non-adjudicative process, with jury trials at 0.1 percent
- In 76 percent of cases, one or both parties are self-represented
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