Judges in Lawyerless Courts

• Author: Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg & Alyx Mark
• Position: Professor of Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law/Clinical Professor of Law, Columbia Law School/Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School/Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University
• Pages: 509-567

Judges in Lawyerless Courts

ANNA E. CARPENTER, COLLEEN F. SHANAHAN, JESSICA K. STEINBERG &

ALYX MARK*

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 accommodation, information, and process

simplification to people without legal representation.

Until now, scholars have known little about judicial behavior in

lawyerless courts, including whether and how judges are implement-

ing role reform recommendations. Our lack of knowledge stands in

stark contrast to the responsibility civil trial judges bear—and the

discretionary power they wield—in dispensing justice for millions of

unrepresented people each year. While today’s civil procedure schol-

arship focuses on documenting and analyzing growing judicial discre-

tion in complex litigation, a much larger sphere of unexamined and

largely unchecked judicial discretion has been hiding in plain sight in

state civil trial courts.

At the intersection of civil procedure, judicial behavior, and access to

justice, this Article presents a theoretically driven multijurisdictional

study of judges’ interactions with unrepresented people in state civil trial

court hearings. It examines courts in three jurisdictions at the top, above

the median, and near the median in the Justice Index (a ranking of state-

level access to justice efforts). Despite significant jurisdictional differen-

ces, judges’ behaviors are surprisingly homogenous in the data. Rather

than offering accommodation, information, and simplification as reform

models suggest, judges maintained the courts’ legal complexity and exer-

cised strict control over evidence presentation.

509

* Anna E. Carpenter is Professor of Law, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. Colleen

F. Shanahan is Clinical Professor of Law, Columbia Law School. Jessica K. Steinberg is Professor of

Law, George Washington University Law School. Alyx Mark is Assistant Professor of Government,

Wesleyan University. © 2022, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg & Alyx

Mark. We thank David Engstrom, Dr. Rebecca Sandefur, Dr. Thomas Clarke, Zachary Clopton, James

Comey, Renee Danser, Elizabeth Emens, Russell Engler, Allyson Gold, John Greacen, Bert Huang,

Alexandra Lahav, Ethan Leib, Len Rieser, Judith Resnik, Dr. Michele Statz, Lauren Sudeall, Matt

Tokson, Daniel Wilf-Townsend and the participants in the Sixth Annual Civil Procedure Workshop, the

Poverty Law Workshop, Columbia Law School’s Faculty Workshop, and the Self-Represented

Litigation Network’s Research Group for feedback on drafts of this Article. This Article and the

underlying study would not have been possible without the help of the following stellar research

assistants: Hilary Adkins, Michelle Bigony, Emily Bock, Anne Bonfiglio, Sophia Goh, Greg Hewitt,

Esther Jiang, Joshua Katz, Michaela Lovejoy, Aryeh Mellman, Michelle Rodriguez, Ashton Ruff,

Seojin Park, Lindsay Pearlman Hannibal, Scott McMurtrey, Elenore Wade, Mason Walther, and Ryan

Williams. Special thanks to Catherine Twigg for her work on data collection. Thanks to our institutions

for research support.

The Article theorizes that a fundamental structural problem drives this

unexpected finding—civil courts were not designed for unrepresented

people. And judicial behavior is shaped by three factors that result:

ethical ambiguity and traditional assumptions about a judge’s role in

adversarial litigation, docket pressure, and systematic legal assistance

provided only to petitioners. The Article concludes that judicial role fail-

ure is but one symptom of lawyerless courts’ fundamental ailment: the

mismatch between courts’ adversarial, lawyer-driven dispute resolution

design and the complex social, economic, and interpersonal problems

they are tasked with solving for users without legal training.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511

I. JUDICIAL ROLE REFORM. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517

A. CALLS FOR REFORM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518

B. UNDERDEVELOPED FORMAL LAW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521

C. GUIDANCE FOR JUDGES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524

1. Offering Information and Explanations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 525

2. Fully Developing the Factual Record . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 527

II. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529

A. THE JURISDICTIONS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 531

B. PROTECTIVE ORDER CASES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534

1. Consistent Substantive Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 534

2. Transferrable Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535

3. Access to Justice Reform History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 536

C. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 537

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 538

A. SIMILARITIES IN JUDGES’ COURTROOM BEHAVIOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 539

1. Maintaining Legal and Procedural Complexity. . . . . . . . 539

a. Opening Speeches as Explanations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 540

b. Limited Explanations and Frequent Use of Jargon. . 542

510 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 110:509

c. Refusing to Explain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 544

2. Controlling and Constraining Evidence Presentation. . . . 548

a. Relying on the Petition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 548

b. Tightly Controlling Evidence Presentation . . . . . . . 551

IV. WHY DO JUDGES BEHAVE SIMILARLY?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556

A. ETHICAL AMBIGUITY AND JUDICIAL ROLE ASSUMPTIONS. . . . . . . . . . 557

B. DOCKET PRESSURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 561

C. LEGAL ASSISTANCE FOR PETITIONERS ONLY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 562

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563

APPENDIX A: SURVEY OF STATE JUDICIAL CANONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 566

INTRODUCTION

You are both adults.. . .You don’t come here to the court to have your little dis-

agreement. You don’t answer my questions and you won’t get heard at all.

1

It is so hard just to be the referee but also want to get involved.

2

State civil trial courts and judges have changed.

3

Historically, lawyers were

expected to drive litigation through adversarial procedures.

4

Judges had a clear,

specific role: passive umpire.

5

Today, most state civil trial courts are lawyerless.

We define “lawyerless” courts as those where more than three-quarters of cases

involve at least one unrepresented party.

6

In some areas of law, such as debt or

eviction, imbalanced representation is the norm—plaintiffs have counsel,

1. This quote is an excerpt from this study’s court observation data. Here, a judge, Centerville Judge

4, was speaking to two unrepresented litigants during a hearing. See infra Part II for a description of this

study’s methods.

2. This quote is an excerpt from this study’s interview data. The speaker is a judge, Centerville Judge

1. See infra Part II for a description of this study’s methods.

3. Anna E. Carpenter, Jessica K. Steinberg, Colleen F. Shanahan & Alyx Mark, Studying the “New”

Civil Judges, 2018 WIS. L. REV. 249, 253, 273 (describing the access to justice crisis in state civil courts

and offering a theoretical framework to support future research on trial judge behavior that includes four

factors: disappearing adversary process, in-person interactions, an ethically ambiguous judicial role, and

static written law).

4. See, e.g., Jessica K. Steinberg, Demand Side Reform in the Poor People’s Court, 47 CONN. L. REV.

741, 751–52 (2015).

5. See Norman W. Spaulding, Essay, The Rule of Law in Action: A Defense of Adversary System

Values, 93 CORNELL L. REV. 1377, 1391 (2008).

6. For the best-available nationally representative data on representation rates in state civil trial

courts, see generally PAULA HANNAFORD-AGOR, SCOTT GRAVES & SHELLEY SPACEK MILLER, NAT’L

CTR. FOR STATE CTS., THE LANDSCAPE OF CIVIL LITIGATION IN STATE COURTS (2015).

2022] JUDGES IN LAWYERLESS COURTS 511