This is a BIG issue with almost no constituency. No one thinks about, supports, or cares about the Courts – until they need to go to court. Cambridge District Court has been in an inaccessible area in Medford for seven years – denying justice to those without cars. Does anyone whose nose is not rubbed in it care? Courts are tucked in former warehouses with almost no public transportation to get to them. Staff is cut and cut and cut – and it is those who cannot afford attorneys who suffer. But in our constitution the Judicial Branch is supposed to be the co-equal of the legislature and the executive – not a beggar standing hat in hand, and saying “Please sir, can I have some more” like Oliver in an orphanage. Deval Patrick let the courts rot and access to justice was not even on his dance card. Deval Patrick even attacked the small, earnest bar of private attorneys willing to accept court appointments to try and protect those in the clutches of DCF. The attorneys who, as a kind of vocation, accept appointments to represent the indigent were treated horribly by the Patrick administration which is how he totally lost my support. I cannot see yet whether Baker understands that the only meaningful laws are those that protect, and that citizens have access to justice to enforce. For a time, I was active in party politics with the hope I could drum up a constituency for access to justice. I have given up. Not even activists seem to care and so my energies – which are limited – will not be expended via party politics which seems not to care at all as to issues of the judicial branches independence, the location and funding for courts and the court system, and the indigent defense bar. I spent time in rehab this month after a total hip replacement. That gave me lots of time to think; and, personally, so did my personal challenges in the last three years. No party that gives the cold shoulder to basic issues that matter to me is entitled to loyalty – loyalty must be earned, and continually. The Massachusetts Democratic Party and the Republican Party both seem quite willing to starve the courts and ignore access to justice; if there are 10 slots on the dance card of each of these two parties, none of those slots are occupied by access to justice as an issue. And for those interested, I am healing, and doing better than expected though I have plenty of work to do in that regard as well.
Will the Courts and access to justice remain standing, hat in hand, like Oliver in the orphanage to say, “Please Sir, can I have more?”
Please share widely!
pogo says
…always the real deal.
judy-meredith says
Missed you a lot, but I know it’s been a very tough couple of years, but the only way out is through. Take care of yourself, be well, and continue to do good things.
AmberPaw says
I haven’t posted for a while, because the “ten slots on my personal dance card” were filled by my husband’s death in 2012 [expedited by a hideous chemo mill], my only sister’s death six months later in 2013, my mother’s death in 2014 and my father’s death in 2015 and my own rather significant health challenges which included avascular necrosis and total failure of the working bits of the left hip. Becoming a bit more bionic with my hip prosthesis leads me to hope that the health challenges, at least, will take a bit of a time out. You may be hearing a bit more from me, but I intend to be quite selective in how I use my time as my capacity for wishful thinking and maybe my naivete have likely worn out.
AmberPaw says
This was a post of mine in 2008, in this very blog: http://vps28478.inmotionhosting.com/~bluema24/2008/01/rosemary-cooper-heroic-bar-advocate-and-great-grandmother-dies-on-january-22-2008/
paulsimmons says
Alas, the issue here isn’t so much that those activists don’t care; it’s that they don’t want to know. However, there are those of us who appreciate all those years you’ve fought the good fight.
You are overdue for a rest: I just wanted to put my respect and thanks on the record.
Christopher says
I’d say simply don’t know, at least in my case. I wonder how this works at the federal level or even for the executive branch, since the legislature IS after all in charge of the purse strings even for the other branches.
Andrei Radulescu-Banu says
Courtroom access is just not a sexy issue to catch people’s fancy as much as, say, building bold new infrastructure or creating a new education program. People who can’t drive themselves to court, need to take public transportation, need access to the public defendant office etc – these are also people who rarely speak up in comments to their legislators, or write in the Boston Globe comments section, or post on social media like BMG.
Local press like the Boston Globe does a great service in general, but it caters to the interests of its readership – we don’t have any statistics indicating what that readership might be. We can imagine it is the people who can afford to pay for subscription, and who have the time to even read the newspaper in their busy lives.
So what’s the solution?
Maybe, as a first step, the state should fund annual or biannual studies looking into court access broken down by level of income, sex, ethnicity – giving a statistical picture of how the courts are working for the populace at large. The state should also open up some of the secrecy laws regarding court procedures, to allow aggregation of confidential data and bring insight into how courts actually adjudicate in obscure and not-so-obscure corners of the law.
jas says
Court appointed attornies in the federal system are paid $127 per hour. I believe state court appoint attorneys are $50-$60 (depending on matter or court). (Murder cases are paid at $100 per hour in the state and $181 per hour in the federal courts.)
To take these rates in context- many court appointed attorneys are in practice for themselves and thus do not have paid vacation or sick time, no contribution of FICA/MED – and most importantly are responsible for all office expenses (rent, malpractice insurance, library, office supplies/postage.) Keeping a law office up and running (with one poorly paid staff person) costs about $50 an hour. Take out the staff person and it is still at least $35 an hour. So there is not much margin on court appointed cases.
AmberPaw says
That is why I call it a near vocation and why there is always a shortage of attorneys doing this kind of work.
scott12mass says
Equal treatment AND equal access to the justice system should be a cornerstone for any govt which expects the loyalty of its citizens. Consumer contracts (mortgages, credit cards) should be written in simple terms which can be understood by the average high school graduate. No court should be built where there is not public transportation and free parking. Legislators (many who are lawyers) have no interest in taking away the mystique of the legal process because their friends and donors benefit.
SomervilleTom says
I mostly agree with this. I quibble with your premise hat “consumer contracts (mortgages, credit cards) should be written in simple terms which can be understood by the average high school graduate”.
Some things are complex, and complexity is not something that today’s public schools prepare their graduates for. I’m not sure the average high school graduate today has ANY ability to do or understand compound interest calculation. Mortgage contracts, in particular, are not simple. The language is complex because the contract being described by that language is complex.
The desire to boil everything down to twitter-sized bumper stickers and slogans is one more symptom of our failing democracy.
To quote Albert Einstein: “Things should be as simple as possible, and not more so.”
scott12mass says
need to get better. I signed a construction contract(as a high school graduate) which had the provision of transferring to a fixed rate mortgage when the construction was over. The bank wanted me to transfer to a variable rate and tried to intimidate me into signing one. I prevailed.
A local high school just had their first “reality” fair. Kids were given packets outlining their future earnings expectations (based on their field of study, it’s a vocational school). The kids went from table to table where they “bought” a house, purchased health care, pre-payed for a funeral, 401k’s. They also spun wheels where fate gave them a lottery win, or a car crash. At the end financial planners evaluated their choices and gave them advice. Those kids learned more that day (by their own account) than they had in all their schooling to that point. It should be required for all schools.
SomervilleTom says
I agree.
I’m just saying that that fixed rate mortgage contract was long and complex. It may have included provisions such as how overpayments are applied (does an overpayment in a given month reduce the principal or is it applied to the next month’s interest payment?), all sorts of provisions for defaults, all sorts of provisions about title, insurance, property taxes, what happens if you declare bankruptcy, etc., etc., etc.
“Natural language” is often natural because it is ambiguous and flexible. Often when we think we “understand” a complex contract, it is because we are mistaken. Legal language is harder to understand because it is, by construction, much less ambiguous.
Contracts are often written using “tested” language — the attorney talks with the client about what the client wants, then the attorney goes to a law library and extracts paragraphs from settled cases (with citations in the law library) that express the same idea. That language is then “woven” into the new contract (using terms like “mortgagor” and “mortgagee”), while the attorney keeps track of the relevant court citations along the way.
Highly structured text like this is much harder, some would say impossible, to recreate using “natural” language’.
I’d be happy if my children were taught even basic things about modern life in school — how to write a check, how to read a bank statement, and so on. More advanced material might include things like what to do with a credit card receipt, how to reconcile a bank or credit card statement, and so on.
I fear that too many graduating high school seniors don’t even know what “overdraft protection” is and how much it costs, or what a monthly fee is for a bank account and how to avoid it.
I suggest that very few people, even with advanced degrees, can calculate an average daily balance from a credit card statement — even with full information — and come up with same answer as Mastercard.
EqualJusticeMA says
Thanks for this post. Equal access to justice is a cornerstone of fairness in our society. But as you note, there is no constituency for this issue. Unless you either work in the justice system or find yourself in need of the courts, you are unlikely to ever realize just how under-resourced our system of justice is.
Meanwhile, it is dramatically worse for people who are poor and need legal counsel related to critical civil legal matters such as eviction from housing, illegal dismissal from employment, domestic violence, and child custody issues.
As Lonnie Powers, executive director of the Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation, wrote so persuasively for Talk Poverty last January, access to civil legal aid services is a potent anti-poverty tool:
Here in Massachusetts, funding for civil legal aid services is insufficient to meet the need. A report by the Boston Bar Association published last year found that an astounding 64 percent of those eligible for civil legal aid services are turned away.
We advocate year-round on this issue, but on January 28, we will be at the State House, along with 500 other attorneys, for Walk to the Hill where we will ask for a $10 million increase in state funding for programs that provide civil legal aid to low-income Massachusetts residents. You can find out more here.
AmberPaw says
Those of us who do court appointed work have seen the budget balanced on our backs for decades – but then, well, so have the poor.