How about a National "Justice Index"?
By: Steve Grumm
America’s justice system should not be a mystery, and its workings should be open and understandable to all. But that ideal is far from the truth.
Millions of people each year come to civil court to fight for their homes, their businesses, their families. Many can’t afford a lawyer, and states aren’t required to give them one. Legal aid groups turn away more than half of the people who come asking. The funding simply doesn’t exist. Even in the criminal justice system, with its constitutional right to counsel, we still see “lawyerless courts” where people are arraigned and jailed on their own.
Of course, it’s not just about having a lawyer, and it’s not just about the poor. In these tough financial times, are courts even functioning? An American Bar Association report in August said courts in most states have seen budget cuts of 10 to 15 percent during the past three years. “The same recession that has led legislatures to reduce access to our justice system has obviously increased the number of people who need it,” the report said.
Which states’ courts are in the worst condition? Which, despite the challenges, are making litigation simpler and less expensive? It’s hard to fix a problem when you can’t see clearly what’s going wrong. There’s no way to tell how one state’s legal system is performing or how it compares with others. It’s time to change that. We need a national Justice Index.
A Justice Index follows on the innovative idea by Yale law professor Heather Gerken of creating a Democracy Index to evaluate America’s election system. A national Justice Index would be a high-profile annual ranking of each state’s approach to legal assistance and the way each handles civil and criminal cases. That ranking would be supported by published data that could be mined by policymakers, the media and the courts themselves.
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