President's Message
| Jurisdiction | United States,Federal |
| Citation | Vol. 5 No. 3 Pg. 4 |
| Pages | 4 |
| Publication year | 1992 |
Is There a Court Crisis?
James Z. Davis, J.
The following article, entitled "Court crisis threatens justice system; bars must take lead" appeared in the November-December 1991 edition of Bar Leader, a publication of the American Bar Association.
In the past two years, courts in California, Florida, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Vermont have temporarily suspended or reduced their civil caseloads so criminal cases could be heard.
In Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York, jurors perform their public service for free for the first three days of a trial.
These are just a few examples of the severe problems plaguing the nation's justice system that have risen to crisis proportions. This sobering information came from a report of the American Bar Association's Special Committee on Funding the Justice System and was discussed during a session of the national Conference of Bar Presidents' meeting.
The report listed 17 symptoms of The following article, entitled "Court crisis threatens justice system; bars must take lead" appeared in the November-December 1991 edition of Bar Leader, a publication of the American Bar Association.
the crisis. These included layoffs or unpaid furloughs of justice-system employees, higher filing and user fees to make up for funds not appropriated by legislatures, the early release of inmates due to prison overcrowding and reduced hours that courthouses are open.
The committee has identified 31 states whose court systems display at least one of these symptoms.
The report concluded that "the situation now threatens not only the quality and timeliness of justice, but puts at risk the most basic Constitutional entitlement of all— access to justice."
A political problem
"This is really a major political problem." said William Wagner of Tampa, Fla., a past president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America and a member of the ABA committee.
Sol Wachtler, Chief Judge for the New York State Court of Appeals, agreed. "The judicial branch is not part of the negotiating process, " he said. "The legislative, the executive branch. . . sit together and they respond to the budget officers, the bean counters in the basement who really don't know what's happening in the courts."
That's why state and local bar associations must take the lead in convincing policy-makers that funding for the justice system is a...
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