JT/DL: 10 Wild Facts about America's Courts Pt. 2
Ending the year strong
The JT/DL is a twice-monthly newsletter about justice technology news, events, and opportunities.
10 Wild Facts about America’s Courts Pt. 2
Welcome back for part two! If you are just joining us, you can read the first five wild facts about America’s courts here. For those that just need a quick refesher, the first half of this list discussed how state and local courts account for nearly 99% of court cases in the U.S., that the wrong people go to jail when court IT goes sideways, and that litigants are not entitled to an attorney in the vast majority of court cases.
With that, let’s jump back in:
Most people go to court without an attorney.
With no right to an attorney in civil cases and attorneys being expensive, about 75% of civil cases have one person who represents themselves. It’s worse when we drill down. For example, only an average of 4% of those facing eviction have an attorney, versus 83% of landlords. How does this discrepancy impact so-called “self-represented litigants”? One study found a significant bias against people representing themselves in court, including that the monetary value of their claim was too high. By contrast, a randomized control trial found that people represented by an attorney in eviction court were 4.4 times more likely to retain possession of their apartments than similar tenants who didn’t have an attorney.
Judges don’t have to be lawyers.
You would think a self-represented person would have less legal training than the judge presiding over their case, but you’d be surprised. The majority of states allow for “lay judges,” these are judges that didn’t go to law school or pass the bar exam. In fact, they can come from any background, from mechanic to manicurist. This has some justification in rural and tribal communities, where access to justice is scarce. However, critical training and oversight are different from state-to-state and training is not required in some states before judges start deciding people’s fates. Luckily, the judicial system has checks on abuse and mistakes—the biggest being that a ruling is appealable to a judge with legal training.
Almost nothing gets appealed.
When any judge gets a legal issue wrong, the losing party can appeal to a higher court to consider the issue. But appeals cost money, they are confusing, and, as we mentioned, people don’t usually have an attorney. So, appeals don’t happen very often. For insight, we can look at states like Florida, Ohio, and Michigan, which all maintain appeals data. They see appeal rates of civil and criminal cases at .5%, .4%, and .2%, respectively. Not cherry picked to make a point, these states are three of the top five states for number of appeals in the country in 2023. This means a ruling from a lay judge has the force of law and is the end of the legal road for most.
There’s only one national philanthropy dedicated to supporting the courts.
Whatever the actual number of courts in the U.S., having one philanthropy focused on the judiciary is a bad ratio. Philanthropy matters because it is a thought partner to government and non-profits and can catalyze experimentation with new, promising ideas—something that courts are hungry for and the public needs. The Pew Charitable Trusts is that sole philanthropy in America with a dedicated, national approach to court reform, and they do great work. However, there’s an endless amount of opportunity for further progress not being addressed. There are, of course, one-off grants here and there from philanthropies servicing criminal justice or economic mobility issues, for example. But that’s distinct from a dedicated court fund with a cohesive theory of change regarding the courts themselves. And while there are federal funding streams, like the State Justice Institute, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the Legal Services Corporation—it’s an understatement to say that the future of those funds are uncertain.
There’s no national group that represents the public’s access to the courts.
There are plenty of organizations that help courts do better. Major national organizations train judges, improve court administration, and support ancillary groups, like legal aid, to support their clients in court. However, all of these groups are optimizing for different constituencies, like judges, court staff, technology vendors, or those that qualify for certain services. Not a single one considers the court-going public their chief constituency. Unfortunately, this makes sense, because courts were never designed for the public in the first place.
While each fact is presented separately, they don’t exist in a vacuum—every challenge compounds another. The person who doesn’t have a lawyer can’t figure out the court’s arcane rules also has their case heard by a lay judge and doesn’t understand their right to appeal. Making matters worse, there’s often no transcript of a trial, which means no one, including the court and the research community, knows what even happened! No matter how you define “justice”, this isn’t it.
While two part series focused on the most eye-widening facts about our courts, I want to be clear that it’s not a hit piece—it’s a call to action. Thousands of court employees across the U.S. are doing the best with the resources they’re given. But after decades of slashed budgets and courts being understaffed, cracks show no matter the dedication and creativity of our public servants. It’s a testament to them that the situation isn’t worse, and they need resources and broad spectrum support if we want things to be better.
As much as it might be hard to hear, this is the reality of our state and local courts and how the public experiences them. As we’ll see in future installments of this series, these challenges don’t stop at the courthouse steps. When outdated court processes and IT are allowed to fester, they can have society-wide ramifications. In short, we’re going to see how bad courts eat good policy.
We’re off for the rest of the year and will be back in your inbox January 6. Happy Holidays!
News
Police swap suspect sketches for AI. (Washington Post) (h/t Zach Zarnow)
An AI model trained on prison phone calls now looks for planned crimes in those calls. (MIT Tech Review) (h/t Keith Porcaro)
ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor. (The Guardian)
Understanding and improving the experience of pro se litigants in the trial court of Massachusetts. (Mass. Courts)
A federal court imposed sanctions for using generative AI without checking the output. (Eastern Dist. Michigan) (h/t Zach Zarnow) Something similar happened in a court in Oregon. (The Oregonian) (h/t John Grant)
A national collection of court standing orders and local rules on the use of AI. (Ropes & Gray) (h/t Natalie Roisman)
Policing children’s data. (Washington U. Law Review)
Grading machines: Can AI exam-grading replace law professors? (Virginia Law & Economics Research)
The Responsible AI Impact Report 2025. (All Tech is Human)
Suffolk Law announced LITEfile, “a simplified e-filing user experience for self-represented litigants.” (LITLab) (h/t David Colarusso)
People are outsourcing their thinking to AI. (The Atlantic)
Events
The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)
Colorado Law is hosting a conference on asymmetries in communication tech, Feb. 1-2. (UCB)
Suffolk Law is hosting LIT Con April 13. (SLS)
RightsCon is May 5-8 in Zambia. (RC)
Jobs & Opportunities
The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)
[New] Code for America has multiple openings. (CfA) (h/t Russ Finkelstein)
[New] The Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design, and the Ethics of Autonomy conference is accepting paper and panel submissions. (DC)
[New] The Digital Life Initiative at Cornell Tech is accepting postdoc submissions. (DLI)
[New] The Electronic Frontier Foundation is hiring legal interns. (EFF)
The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)
Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)
[New] The Institute for Law and AI has multiple openings. (ILAI)
[New] The Kansas Courts need someone to run their language access program. (KC)
[New] Lambda Legal needs a legal project manager. (LL)
[New] The MacArthur Foundation needs a director of AI and opportunity. (MF)
[New] The Mozilla Foundation is accepting nominations for fellows. (MF)
The Pew Charitable Trusts need an officer for its new State Science and Technology Policy Fellowship Initiative. (Pew)
[New] The Privacy Law Scholars Conference is accepting paper submissions. (PLSC)
The Recoding America Fund has three open roles. (RAF)
[New] Renaissance Philanthropy’s Big If True Science Accelerator is accepting applicants. (RP)
[New] The Sovereign Tech Fund needs a leader. (STF)
[New] Tech Policy Press needs an assistant editor. (TPP)
[New] Wired needs a senior politics reporter. (W)
[New] Yale ISP is accepting resident fellow applications through the end of the year. (ISP)