ABA Survey: Underfunding the Courts Is Hurting the Economy & Impacts Public Safety
There’s a strong perception that the nation’s courts are underfunded, leading to a negative impact on the economy and public safety as well as access to the justice system, according to an informal study of lawyers and judges conducted by the ABA.
Key findings of the survey are that 68 percent of the respondents said courts aren’t adequately funded to meet the needs of the community. The same number of respondents—68 percent—said underfunding the courts has a negative effect on the economy. And 77 percent of the respondents said there is a negative effect on public safety.
Preliminary survey results were released today in conjunction with a press briefing in Washington, D.C., featuring ABA President Stephen N. Zack and Theodore B. Olson, one of the co-chairs of the Task Force on Preservation of the Justice System. David Boies, the other task force co-chair, participated by video conference.
Zack appointed the task force in August to study the impact of funding cutbacks on the courts and to develop recommendations for consideration by the ABA’s policymaking House of Delegates.
In the view of 71 percent of the respondents, there are significant barriers to access to the justice system, particularly for poor and moderate-income individuals and small businesses.
The impact of underfunding is being felt by both criminal and civil courts, according to the survey results. There is greater pressure to plea bargain or settle in both criminal and civil cases, said 61 percent of the respondents.
Of those surveyed, 61 percent identified delays in criminal hearings and 82 percent noted delays in civil cases.
The findings are based on responses from 7,585 lawyers and judges to a survey sent by e-mail to nearly 200,000 ABA members. While the sample did not use a probability-based selection method, the preliminary survey report asserts that the response pool represents the general legal population.
The findings also track what the ABA has been hearing on the issue, said Zack and the task force co-chairs at today’s briefing. Similar themes were sounded by the public hearing held by the task force at the ABA Midyear Meeting in Atlanta.
“We all have a sense that the courts are inadequately funded, but the task force is learning just how serious that problem is,” said Boies, who is chairman of Boies Schiller & Flexner.
One of the problems cited by Boies is that “there is no political constituency for the justice system.” Along with Zack and Olson, Boies indicated that an important job of the task force will be to convince legislators and other decision-makers that everyone is being hurt by inadequate funding for the courts.
“We’re all soldiers in this war,” said Zack, who is administrative partner in the Miami office of Boies Schiller & Flexner. Olson is a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and a former U.S. solicitor general.
