Miscellaneous

Nice Work if You Can Get It: After-Hours Family Court

By Anne Skove, Esq.

How many times have we Googled "night court" only to find paths back to the 80s tv show of the same name?

Like Judge Harry and his hatful of tricks, night court is not as wonderful as everyone thinks. It's not as popular with constituents as one might expect; people do not want to go to court at night any more than they want to go there in the daytime. Court employees hate it for obvious reasons. It costs a bundle to keep all those lights on. And bald bailiffs are just not that funny.

Harris County, Texas, may have found a way out of some common night court problems. They just started a Family Law Evening Court. The idea is to make the court more accessible to the beloved "working poor," although the vampire lobby may have had a hand in it.

Utilizing volunteer attorneys and judges, as Harris County is, keeps costs down. Having them work by candlelight without any support from court staff would be even cheaper, but we have no evidence that this idea was even bandied about.

It seems to us that making more services available online, telephonically, or via mail would be even more helpful to parties, and at lower cost in financial and human resources to courts. Most courts already do these things to some extent.

The extended hours occur only the second Tuesday of the month. This illustrates another common misconception about night court -- they are not usually 24/7 operations. (The few exceptions are for criminal cases.)

Night courts don't always turn out the way legislators (who often are the ones who come up with the idea) expect. We'll see how the Harris County experiment turns out. It's small and unambitious enough that it just might work well.

Meanwhile, we will ponder whether the death of the sitcom corresponds with the demise of the night court concept.

See New Family Law Evening Court Set for Debut, Houston Business Journal (September 4, 2008), and keep tabs on the new tv season with Heather Havrilesky's I Like to Watch column in Salon.

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on September 08, 2008 (boomark / email).