Litigation

Tribe Urges Activism for Improved Access to Justice

By Peter Hardin

Scholar and Justice Department counselor Laurence Tribe has delivered a strong appeal to state chief justices, urging them to take action to expand access to justice for key groups: the poor, juveniles and the middle class.

Addressing the yearly conference of chief justices and state court administrators, Tribe described as “deplorable” the problems that face state judicial systems and called for a non-ideological kind of “judicial activism” to confront them, according to a National Law Journal article by Tony Mauro.

Tribe commended “the integrity and efficacy of American courts” but said no one ought to “condone indifference to the early warnings of disintegration to which some of you have called sober attention.” The following excerpt from Mauro’s report gives a example of the Tribe’s detail and tone:

“Among the ills Tribe catalogued were: ‘a system in which the deck is stacked in favor of those who already have the most;’ the ‘punitive urge,’ which results in over-incarceration matched by inadequate legal assistance for defendants; sharp budget cuts in state courts, which handle 95 percent of all legal cases; and a turning away from public courts in favor of private adjudication for ‘privileged litigants who can afford it.’ The last trend, Tribe said, has the unfortunate result that ‘the powerful constituencies that once treated the public courts as their arbiters of last resort develop a diminishing stake in keeping the public judicial system afloat.’”

Tribe, best known as a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School, has been at work for five months as senior counselor to Attorney General Eric Holder for access to justice. He outlined several proposals for change, including “access to justice” commissions established to study and take up the fight for improved legal services.

Full post as published by The Gavel on August 04, 2010 (boomark / email).