Access to Justice: Enforcing Rights and Securing Protection

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of civil litigation as it affects poor and low-income people. The U.S. Constitution is intended to “establish Justice,” but many poor and low-income people experience the court system as a source of injustice—subjecting them to meritless default judgments, fees and fines, imprisonment and forfeiture of property when no crime has been committed, and enforcing harsh collateral consequences of contacts with the criminal justice system. Moreover, many low-income people are blocked from going to court at all, because employment and consumer contracts include boilerplate terms that mandate arbitration, consigning the claimant to a private system of dispute resolution that has been questioned as unfair and in conflict with statutory and constitutional rights. Part of the problem is that the legal system assumes that litigants have the resources they need to bring or defend a civil action. The U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to counsel in civil litigation, and fee waivers, even when they are available, do not cover all of the costs of litigation. A rising number of civil litigants face stiff obstacles when seeking justice under law, for they cannot afford legal representation and lack resources to litigate in a meaningful way. This chapter is designed to help low-income people navigate the civil court system so that it moves closer to the ideal of equal justice under law, rather than exacerbate poverty or further entrench racial inequality.