I have some brainstorming suggestions, but I want yours as well, not just a debate on mine.
We’ve all seen the TV courtrooms. A lot of struggle and drama over a few hundred or a couple of thousand dollars.
Of course, the current TV judges seem to go into the non-legal aspects just for show, letting the parties ramble on about lost loves and grudges and trading insults, then tell them none of that matters. That’s why I miss the original Judge Wapner who just got quick to the law. But ignoring TV and thinking about real courts:
Seems like if the process were easier, the answers could be dished out instantly.
And then we would need a few new laws to enforce the outcomes.
So I wonder what checklist tests and new laws we would need to cut 80% of the caseload. For example:
New law - Any loan without a set payback date is default due in 3 months. You want more, put it in writing.
New law - Any payment made by one person because the other person is in a bind is automatically a loan, not a gift, and has to be repaid. For example, money for bail or money to get a towed car out of impound, or travel fare for a funeral, or to keep a cell phone account open.
New law - Any loan put on a credit card or checking account has to be repaid to cover all the carrying charges and fees.
New law - If you lose a case you have to pay on the spot. No more having to go back to court to get enforcement, it happens right then. The deputy follows you out to the lot and impounds your car or goes to your house and repossesses your TV, or they freeze your accounts, garnish your wages. Only the homeless get to stall repayment.
Tests before you can see a judge:
Do you have an estimate of the damages, written, signed by a repair company or expert? No, the clerk will not even let you file your complaint.
Have you piled on “pain and suffering” without physical injury? Forget it.
Are you trying to collect replacement costs for a used item? Sorry Charlie.
Are you trying to keep the ring when you jilted him? Not in this state you can’t.
Are you defending your non-payment by complaining the lender keeps hounding you for his money back and you keep saying you don’t have it yet? That’s not a defense, it’s proof of the debt. Just concede defeat at the courthouse door or you’ll pay additional court fees.
TV “Courtrooms” are not courtrooms at all. They are merely binding arbitrations. So whatever idea you’re getting from those shows, have nothing to do with real courtrooms.
Wapner, and some of the others, had been real judges before moving to televised arbitration.
Can’t do that. Certain property is exempt from execution, and the list of exemptions varies by state. Also, you have no way of knowing if there is already a superior lien on the property you propose to seize on the spot. Some states do not allow wage garnishment. Some debtors do not earn enough money to be garnished. Some bank accounts can’t be attached by most creditors–for example, if the account contains only SSI or SSD funds. Also, in real trial courts, there is usually a right to appeal.
Pain and suffering are real; they’re just hard to quantify. Maybe that’s a reason to kick the case up to a general court and off the small-claims docket, but I can’t see eliminating them entirely.
Nonsense. If we’re having an argument in my living room and you shoot out my TV, you’re sure as hell buying me a new one.
What you said agrees with me. They aren’t small claims matters.
Sorry Charlie, no court will reimburse you with a new digital set for a an old analog one. You get current value, not replacement value. So it just wastes everyone’s time to allow those cases to be filed.
Hello Again -
This thread is not about TV. It’s about real court. Have you been to real court?
I was an employee of a real small claims court. The stuff I mentioned happens.
Oakminster -
The topic is changes to the law, so citing current law doesn’t work here.
Everyone else -
The OP is this:
" How could we streamline small claims court? I have some brainstorming suggestions, but I want yours as well, not just a debate on mine."
I have a suggestion that Tom Tildrum will like: Make the law work the way he thinks it does and require damaged property to be replaced rather than just recompensed.
In fact, I’d suggest raising the stakes entirely. Give the judge power to go beyond the actual damages if he thinks one party is honest and the other is a weasel. Say someone sues his ex for taking the TV and stereo, but the ex proves they were actually hers before they moved in together. Then the judge, instead of just dismissing the case, could find the suer owes the defendant the amount sued for. So suing is no longer a no-risk proposition.
Sounds like the OP would also support summary executions without trial.
I’ve been dragged through civil court, and in comparison, small claims is extremely streamlined and simplified.
In small claims, you can go from typing up a claim, serving the defendant, filing and being in front of a judge and done in under six weeks. For civil, you’re lucky if you get a trial-setting conference to put your case on the court’s calendar within two months of another two months’ worth of back-and-forth filing and serving of claims and answers.
So if I get drunk at Tom Tildrum’s party and kick in his TV, I don’t owe him a TV, I just owe him enough money to buy half of a TV? That make sense sometimes – if I crashed his car, I could buy him a used car of similar value to make him whole. But it isn’t like there’s a large market of used 42" plasma TVs, so actual value is hard to determine, and in any case, Tom would have to pay hundreds of dollars to get a replacement TV. That’s not fair if he did nothing wrong.
I have a fondness for TV judge shows. The one thing I would like to see added is that a TV small claims judge should be able to make binding orders for people to go to drug and alcohol rehab programs.
I live in Vermont, and took my ex-landlord to small claims court to get back my deposit. Before we went before the judge, him and I had a meeting with two arbitrators. We talked things out and made a deal, and didn’t have to waste the judge’s time.
The arbitrators were two nice ninety year old women, one of whom was blind. They asked really good questions, and kept the whole thing friendly. We both got to vent, and in the end he wrote me a check for the deposit. I did stand a chance of losing in court; but I got my money, not a court order for him to pay someday.
Doesn’t sound like the OP is after that, but I like it. We should do that to the guys at Guantanamo, plus those landlords that try to keep your deposit. It would only take one hanging a year to keep them in line.
Well, as I recall, Hello Again will presently be a licensed attorney in New York and Oakminster is one now.
I find your proposals pretty unpersuasive. Regarding the collection-on-the-spot, Oakminster was citing current law to explain to you why we couldn’t legislate such a rule, but rather to explain to you why we have the rule we do and why your alternative is undesirable. We don’t seize every last asset of the judgment debtor because we don’t want to leave people in destitution (and the need for recourse to public funds). A better compromise is to allow them to retain certain valuable assets that they can use to hold down a job and make regular payments or submit to wage garnishment.
Others of your proposals are already the law, such as needing to couple a P&S claim for damages with physical manifestations. This is (i) still the majority rule, as I recall, and (ii) the traditional rule as well. Still others don’t seem grounded in economic reality: No replacement cost for used items? So if your used car is worth under $10,000, the small claims limit in Illinois, you can’t sue if it’s totaled? What sense does that make? Or your rule on who keeps the ring: again, usually settled by state law and done on a no-fault basis (since we don’t want to waste public dollars on refereeing romantic break-ups). And it’s hard to see how any of this furthers your stated aim of “streamlining” the small claims system.
And that threshold question is never answered. Does the small claims system need to be streamlined at all? Sure, it’s not insta-justice. But your system of insta-justice is really just an assemblage of your own unreflective notions of what should be important to people and what we shouldn’t waste time with. And certainly the issue of what’s too minor for court comes into play. But what you don’t seem to understand is that the courts are not some institution that should univocally express your own notions about the propriety of litigation. That is, just because you can say “Well, I wouldn’t have sued in that situation” doesn’t mean nobody should be permitted to.
Small claims is just the regular old common law that has been evolving for centuries and that has been refined by its application to countless situations both routine and fanciful. On the other hand, you’ve worked in one court, in one town, and not even as a member of the judiciary and thus unaware of much of the theory that the law implements–which is why your recommendations are really kind of unequivocally sucky. Sorry.
I have a case pending in Small Claims Court right now. I just finished law school, and I really didn’t want to be That Guy, but my ex-landlord is such a recalcitrant, unscrupulous slumlord that I had no choice.
Where I live, Small Claims is part of the regular trial court. Same judges, same substantive laws apply. The only differences I see are that the procedure is waaaay simplified, there isn’t usually any discovery (not sure how that’s going to play out for me), and most of the rules of evidence don’t apply. And it’s always a bench trial. Having spent the last three years learning all about the regular procedures, I’m actually feeling a little lost right now.
How could we streamline it? For some reason the local clerk quit taking credit cards, which was a bit of a pain. Electronic filing would also be nice. Sorry, I got nuthin.
This sounds like a case of two bad systems.
What we need is to speed up all trials. Something’s wrong with a system where there is always a line, like the DMV. If everyone is being delayed by 6 weeks, what we need is to bring back a retired judge to sit for 5 weeks to clear the backlog. Then every future case can be tried the week after it’s filed. I for one need that rent deposit back now, not six weeks from now.
Doesn’t really work that way. Sometimes it takes more than a week to serve process on the Defendant. His time to respond doesn’t start until he is served. He may have a counterclaim, and if he does, the plaintiff needs time to respond to that, witnesses may have to be subpoena’d, the case may need to be removed to a higher court, etc.
Also, at least in my state, our equivalent to small claims court only hears civil cases two days a week. The other three days are the misdemeanor criminal docket, preliminary hearings/setting bond on felony arrests, etc.
