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There are innumerable problems with our wonderful judicial system here in Amerika, otherwise known as the world’s largest crime syndicate.  One of its many failings concerns the “cash cow” that self-represented—or pro se—litigants provide for it.  That is the topic of this post.

Courts make an enormous amount of money off the backs of the populace.  This has been proved during the most recent government shutdown.  The federal courts declared that they would remain in operation due to the surplus of funds paid by its victims, everyday people.  As can be seen on this arm of the world's largest crime syndicate's website, it "remains open and will continue paid operations through Friday, Oct. 17, by using court fee balances."

For all courts except the Supreme Court of the United States, a pro se litigant should pay the civil case filing fee only once the case reaches the pre-trial hearing, or at the very least, after the case reaches discovery.  For cases brought to the Supreme Court on a petition for a writ of certiorari or the like, the pro se litigants there should only pay the filing fee after the writ is granted.

As it stands now, self-represented litigants are treated as an unlimited financial resource from the syndicate’s perspective.  The filing fee is paid—for such litigants proceeding without a fee waiver—and not long afterward, many of the cases are discarded, i.e. dismissed.  In reality, some staff attorney at the courthouse gives a pro se’s filing a quick once-over, if anything, and then hands it off to the judge for rubber-stamping of the dismissal recommended by the staff attorney.

At most, this entire procedure probably takes no more than an hour of time.  With today’s outrageous filing fees reaching $600 or more in some courts, this means that the syndicate is sometimes making around $600 an hour to flush a pro se litigant’s case.  If this doesn’t sound like justice to you, you’re not alone.  Forget the fact that unfortunate citizens who are seeking redress for real problems are having their lives shattered at the whim of some lowly lawyer acting as the evil right hand for the syndicate.

There is exactly zero incentive for the syndicate to deliver justice when its members can simply pull the flush chain on a case, take the next one in line, and do the same thing.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  Rather than letting a case proceed as it should through litigation, the syndicate plays the numbers game.  It takes in as many cases as it can and drops each one on the floor as quickly as possible.

Do the math.  Assuming a $500 filing fee, this figure divided by twenty hours of the syndicate’s time, for example, to give an action the real justice it deserves is $25 per hour.  $500 divided by just one hour—the “time” required to give the matter the mighty tidy swirl—yields $500 an hour, or twenty times as much.  The option syndicate members are going to take almost exclusively is the path of least resistance and the one with the greatest monetary reward.

By requiring unrepresented litigants to pay filing fees later in the case, it disincentivizes the syndicate from doing essentially no work and getting massive pay.....not to mention destroying many peoples’ lives in the process.  Unfortunately for the commoner, there is no mechanism to control how the courts “operate” in this nation.  Actually, there is no true mechanism to control anything within the syndicate, but that has been a topic in past posts.

In general, the courts themselves—through the Judicial Conference of the United States and similar bodies at the state level—set up the “rules” about how the syndicate should function.  They’ve given our (oftentimes unelected) lawyers in black gowns immunity.  They’ve determined how the “oversight” boards are to be comprised.  They’ve made it so that everyday people have no way of obtaining justice if the syndicate wants to block justice, which is pretty much the syndicate's current standard operating procedure.  Included in the rules are the schedule of filing fees and when and how they are to be paid.

None of this is meant to sound earth shattering to those who are familiar with the syndicate, but to those who aren’t, this material should provide some meaningful food for thought.  Considering that most people will face the syndicate at some point in their lives—and very likely fall victim to it—the information provided herein should enlighten the average person beforehand about yet another disgusting facet regarding how the judiciary “works” in this once great nation.