JT/DL: 10 Wild Facts about America's Courts Pt. 1
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10 Wild Facts You Didn’t Know About America’s Courts Pt. 1
To complement the development of the Court Innovation Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy and my research at the Georgetown AI and the Legal Profession initiative, I’m starting an “open notebook” project. This project is a chance to share my evolving thinking around courts and court innovation, the public’s access to justice, and the catalytic role technology and philanthropy can play in ushering in a new era of responsive and accessible courts. Thank you to all my editors, especially Hannah Hartford, who helped improve this project.
For those of you I haven’t had a chance to meet, I’m Jason Tashea, the Court Innovation Fellow at Renaissance and AI and Courts Fellow at Georgetown. I’ve spent nearly 15 years at the intersection of justice systems and technology developing products; consulting courts; and researching and publishing on the space. I currently co-lead the Court Innovation Roundtable, a quarterly convening of national court innovation leaders, with Erika Rickard at the Pew Charitable Trusts. This is all to say: I spend a lot of time thinking about the courts and how they function.
I want to kick off this series with a two-part primer about the reality of America’s state and local courts.
Over the last five years, I’ve been focused on getting people to care about the courts. Specifically, I want them to care about local and state courts, the nucleus of our justice system. During this time, I’ve learned a lot about what shocks people the most when talking about these critical administrative systems of justice. While I’ve become inured to what I outline below, any interlocutor’s eyes usually go big when they hear it explained for the first time. And it’s my belief that this shock—as measured by the diameter of their visible eye—reflects them seeing the gravity of the problem for the first time. This recognition is a critical first step to bring them into the fold.
With that in mind, I wanted to catalog the 10 most wild facts about America’s courts. In a country where we have a strange exaltation of courts—enough to make endless TV shows, movies, and podcasts about them—what I include below should make us wonder if we’ve been sitting on our laurels and letting the chief administrator of the justice system, the courts, atrophy to our collective detriment. So, here we go:
State and local courts see 99% of all American cases.
With so much media coverage on the federal courts, you’d think that’s where all the action is, but it’s not. Nearly all of America’s most existential issues are litigated and resolved in our state and local courts. With almost 70 million cases a year—including evictions, divorces, traffic, and criminal matters—state and local caseloads dwarf the 760,000 cases the federal system sees each year, including bankruptcy cases. Not only are state and local courts how Americans experience the law, for many they are also how they experience government. The number of Americans in court per year is on par with our largest government programs, including Social Security (74.4 million) and Medicare (62.7 million). If docket size reflected media coverage, most would think the U.S. Supreme Court dominates. But on average, our highest court hears only about 80 cases a year.
We don’t know how many courts there are in the U.S.
Insane, right? But, really, we don’t. There’s anywhere between 3,000 to 10,000 state and local courts in the United States, and anyone who says they have an exact number is lying. Why don’t we know how many courts there are in the U.S.? Because it’s no one’s job to keep count.
A family of four spends more on groceries in a week than states do on courts in a year.
State and local courts rely on a mix of funding from state and local appropriations, court imposed fines and fees, and modest federal support. Courts can receive as little as .7 % of the state budget, as is the case in Texas, and as much as 3 percent, in the case of Oregon. In fact, in 2024, only about 1.4% of state budgets nationwide went to the courts. Put another way, state court spending is about $158 per resident, about half of what a family of four pays for groceries every week. With 98% of court budgets going toward salaries, just two percent is left for capital expenses, including technology.
Court IT is bad, and when it’s really bad you go to jail.
You read that right: when court tech doesn’t work, the wrong people wind up in prison. In multiple states, standard data transfers from old case management systems (CMS) to new ones led to closed warrants being reopened. Meaning, the next time that person is pulled over for an out taillight, they end up being arrested on an incorrect warrant. In other states, rolling out a new case management system has also meant people being kept in jail longer than their sentence. It shouldn’t be the case that launching a new court CMS leads to a habeas lawsuit, but here we are.
Your right to an attorney? Not so much.
If you’ve watched Law & Order, you know that you have a right to a lawyer and if you cannot afford one, one will be appointed. Well, that’s only in criminal court and not even all the time. In civil court—where people are evicted, get restraining orders, or try to get out from underneath medical debt—there’s no national right to counsel. It doesn’t matter that a civil case can become a criminal one if, for example, court imposed fines or fees go unpaid—people still don’t get a lawyer.
Well, that was a lot, and we’re only half way there. In the next essay, I’ll finish up this list and set up the coming pieces hoping to overcome or, dare I even say, fix these problems.
News
Prosecutors allegedly used AI to keep a man in jail. (New York Times)
Someone finally did an audit of a legal aid chatbot. (Duke)
How bureaucracy lost its builders. (State Capacitance)
A conversation about building a data commons for a New York police department. (Measures for Justice)
DNA collection poses tough ethical questions for criminal law. (Center Square)
The U.S. Crime Victimization Survey for 2023 is out. (BJS)
An introduction to relational procurement. (Digital Public)
OnlyFans starts criminal background checks of its creators. (404 Media)
Inside ICE defense training on Fortnite. (404 Media)
Events
The Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference is Jan. 28-30. (LSC)
Jobs & Opportunities
The Brennan Center has paid and internship opportunities, including in justice reform. (BC) (h/t Eduardo Gonzalez)
The Fortune Society needs a data analyst. (FS)
The Free Law Project needs a backend developer. (FLP)
[New] The Gates Foundation needs a deputy director for its AI and Data Enablement Hub. (GF)
The Harvard Belfer Center is accepting fellowship applications. (HBC)
[New] Ideas42 needs an advocacy director to end missed court dates. (I42)
The Pew Charitable Trusts need an officer for its new State Science and Technology Policy Fellowship Initiative. (Pew)
[New] The Recoding America Fund has three open roles. (RAF)
[New] The Recoding America Fund also is accepting RFIs for potential AI projects. (RAF)