Public and scholarly attention to pro se litigation is growing. In Mapping the Civil Justice Gap in Federal Court, Roger Michalski (Oklahoma) and Andrew Hammond (Oklahoma) provide a helpful empirical perspective.
Careful attention to pro se litigation is warranted. The sheer volume of pro se litigants will surprise many, if not most. According to the authors' calculations, last year 12 percent of the non-prisoner civil cases filed in federal district courts (more than 25,000 cases) were pro se. Aside from the scope of this issue, "pro se litigants raise unique practical, doctrinal, and normative concerns for the legal academy, the bar, and the federal bench.”
Not surprisingly, methodological challenges limit empirical assessments of pro se litigation. While the paper is appropriately mindful of these limitations, it nonetheless does not "let the perfect be the enemy of the good." As such, the paper analytically confines itself to describing "where pro se litigants live and identify the communities they inhabit." To be sure, while a modest contribution it nonetheless adds to the knowledge base. That said, analytic limitations endure. "None of our claims speak to the characteristics of pro se litigants directly, only indirectly. This is an important limitation of this study and raises bias concerns. Bias might creep in because it is possible that pro se litigants are systematically atypical of the neighborhoods in which they live."
To accomplish its goals, and limitations aside, the paper exploits "a massive data set of 2.5 million federal dockets from a ten-year period, we obtained addresses of non-prisoner pro se litigants. We then geolocated these addresses and cross-referenced that information with demographic and economic Census data." After various data exclusions (e.g., prisoner suits and cases involving habeas, immigration/deportation cases, naturalization, and bankruptcy claims), what remained included approximately 20,000 federal civil cases per year.
The papers dwells on two core findings. One involves pro se litigants' "profound ordinariness." A second finding involves exceptions to the first. "Even after accounting for population and income, pro se litigants are more likely to reside in communities that are not homogenously white. And numerous rural communities feature fewer pro se litigants than expected.” An excerpted abstract follows.
"Unrepresented litigants make up a sizable and normatively important chunk of civil litigation in the federal courts. Despite their importance, we still know little about who these pro se litigants are. Debates about pro se litigation take place without sufficient empirical information. To help fill some of the gaps in our understanding of pro se litigants, this Article takes a new approach by mapping where pro se litigants live."
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