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Court Forms and Court Reforms: Pro Se Litigants and the Limited Success of Standardized Family Court Forms
No full textThe first step in any civil lawsuit, long before a court will contemplate awarding relief, is initiating the court matter: a plaintiff must always start by effectively pleading their case. The court system rests upon the presumption that an attorney will create and file the requisite court documents—including complaints, answers, and motions—on behalf of their client. The reality, however, is that an extraordinarily high number of litigants do not have legal representation and must therefore proceed pro se and submit these documents on their own. Most jurisdictions offer pro se litigants standardized, fillable court forms. These forms are intended to improve access to the court system and are often referenced as proof of a jurisdiction’s efforts to promote access to justice, but they can have the opposite effect. This Article seeks to advance the discussion of the court system’s accessibility by critiquing these ubiquitous standardized forms and questioning the forms’ efficacy in light of other, more intractable hurdles that underserved litigants must overcome to unlock the courthouse doors.
While the issues addressed herein affect all civil pro se litigants, they are of particular concern for litigants in family court. Family courts have significantly high rates of pro se litigants, and standardized forms proliferate in family court systems. Moreover, the unique nature of familial disputes—involving emotionally complex bonds and successive requests for court intervention—demand that more attention be paid to the issue of court access. This Article will examine standardized family court forms as a means to illuminate larger issues of access and justice in family court and beyond
Reforming Abolition
No full textAbolition is an elusive concept, which allows people with various political views to identify with the idea. This Article unpacks some of the conceptual features that lead to its elusiveness. This imprecision has empowered some to point out the diverse—if not inconsistent—positions that self-identified abolitionists take when articulating the contemporary abolition movement’s demands. The question then becomes whether the movement could protect itself from being a rootless position with insufficient tools to guide change. I suggest that it can. Rather than getting caught up in debates about abolition’s ends, I propose that more attention be paid to abolition’s grounds. By focusing on what grounds abolition, we see that the threat to the movement does not come from those who stop short of absolutism (that is, those who do not advocate abolishing our penal systems altogether); rather, it comes from those who ground their absolutism in principles inconsistent with the positive features necessary to achieve an abolition democracy. A consequence of this view is that the lines between abolition and reform become blurry. Some abolitionists argue that this blurriness is reason to reject reformist proposals. However, I suggest that this ambiguity is not a problem—and, indeed, may be beneficial. I point out that most abolitionists are out to reform something, and the primary source of disagreement within the movement is about what must be reformed. This, however, doesn’t mean that we should, as many suggest, distinguish abolitionism by its pursuit of non-reformist reforms (or “abolitionist steps”) instead of reformist reforms. Rather than being a helpful way to separate abolitionism from less progressive reforms, I argue that the appeal to non-reformist reforms substitutes one elusive term (abolition) for another (non-reformist reforms), rejects legitimate reforms that benefit persons currently suffering in our legal systems, and advances a conception of progressive change that forecloses valuable opportunities to mobilize the least well-off. More people are engaging with abolitionist thinking than ever before. This Article is an attempt to shift the discourse around abolition so that the concept primarily serves its political mission and allows abolitionists to avoid getting bogged down in debates that have little upshot today. In other words, it’s a call to reform abolition
Fall 2025 - Finding Briefs and Other Court Filings
No full textThe judicial opinion is the last chapter of a long story. The key to a case’s history is its docket. This program will guide you through the steps to finding complaints, briefs, motions, and other filings by searching court dockets. Get the whole story Underground.
Resources Covered: Bloomberg Law, PACER, Court Listener, Lexis+, government websites
Host: Kate Britt, JD, MLIS | Reference Librarianhttps://repository.law.umich.edu/legaltechseries/1016/thumbnail.jp
What’s Left of the New Deal State?
No full textA vast body of scholarship situates itself in the New Deal era. Another extensive collection explores the history of criminal justice in the United States. To date, however, there has been little effort to bring these conversations together. New Deal Law and Order, written by legal historian Anthony Gregory, fills this conspicuous gap. Gregory remarkably narrates the New Deal era through the lens of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “war on crime” (p. 1), challenging how we think about both the New Deal’s legacy and the foundations of the modern security state
Should the States Return to Worldwide Combined Reporting?
No full textOn February 20 the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) released a report on the revenue implications of states adopting worldwide combined reporting (WWCR). WWCR refers to a method of taxation that several states (for example, California) applied from the 1970s to the 1990s. Under WWCR, the state takes the entire worldwide profit of a multinational operating in the state and multiplies it by a formula that traditionally combines payroll, tangible assets, and sales in the state divided by worldwide payroll, assets, and sales. The result is the amount of profit taxable in that state
Tone Coach
No full textThink of how many emails you have sent in the past week, month, and year. Did you always strike the appropriate tone? Did you always use the right words? Did you consistently sound the way you intended? I encourage my law students to use these questions to periodically give themselves some self-feedback. Take a look at your recent (and not-so-recent) correspondences, I tell them. Read your words aloud. Assess whether the voice you hear is the voice you want others to hear
Deputization and Privileged White Violence
No full textA number of high-profile and racially charged killings, such as Trayvon Martin’s, Kenneth Herring’s, Ahmaud Arbery’s, and Jordan Neely’s, have been at the hands of civilians declaring themselves the law. These deaths stemmed from a phenomenon best described as “deputization.” Deputization describes a latent legal power that has empowered White people throughout American history to claim authority to enforce the law, as they see it, upon racial minorities generally and Black people in particular. This power turned the ancient common law duty to police all felons in England into a specific American common law duty to police Blacks. From the founding clauses of the Constitution to the Fugitive Slave Acts, to the birth of racist citizen’s arrest laws, there has always been an implicit understanding that part of Whiteness in America is a privilege to use private force to police Black people
Feedback Loops: Feedback Thresholds
No full textThe idea that folks Become more comfortable about talking because they see other people do it may seem simple. But the effect can be profound-on jury pools, in classrooms, and when trying to get a robust dose of feedback from an initially reticent group
Feedback Loops: Challenge & Recovery
No full textAbout halfway through the course on feedback I teach to law students, I tell them to take out their calendar and look over their recent schedule. How many days in the previous few weeks, I ask them, felt like challenge days ? I explain that challenge days are days when you have to perform at a high level, whether because a major task requires a lot of your energy and mental bandwidth-studying for a big test, preparing for a tough negotiation, dealing with an unexpected family crisis-or because the time available to handle a lot of minor tasks seems cruelly inadequate. If lunch yesterday consisted of a KitKat, two phone calls, and some frantically typed emails, you likely had a challenge day. I then describe a different kind of day: recovery days:• These are days that are intentionally much less hectic. Efficiency and execution are not the goals. Rejuvenation is
ESG Irony: Why Corporate Tax Avoidance Must Be Considered
No full textEnvironmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing has been the focus of major attention in corporate law. Many writers praised ESG as the future of corporate governance. The push for ESG comes from the belief that the government is incapable of fulfilling its responsibility of achieving social and environmental goals, and that corporations are frequently in the best position to help. ESG investing has been significantly bolstered by large asset management institutions like BlackRock Group, State Street Global Advisors, and Vanguard Group. The “Big Three” own large stakes in most public corporations, which they have been pushing to address ESG issues