Posted on May 16, 2016 by Michelle Chen in The Nation The Nation, By Michelle Chen Americans are famous for filing lawsuits left and right, but for litigants living in poverty, justice can be harder to find. When facing civil litigation, a massive gap in legal-aid services reflects and reproduces the very injustices that often drive poor litigants into the courts in the first place. Unlike criminal proceedings, in which the indigent are provided with a public defender, in civil cases counsel is generally not guaranteed for those who cannot afford it. While federal authorities have begun exploring corruption issues in lower-level courts—especially scandals over municipalities running modern-day “debtors’ prisons” that impose predatory fines on the poor—there’s less public attention on the chronic scarcity of legal aid in civil litigation, including divorces, labor disputes, and other seemingly banal legal matters with complex social implications.
