Huffington Post Documents How Bad Civil Courts Rationing Is

Rationing justice, civil and criminal, begins with overburdened courts. And Huffington Post just released well-researched report on just how bad it’s become on a federal level, with more than 60 judgeships going unfilled and pleas for more help being ignored by the U.S. Congress. In some cases, judges are handling hundreds more cases than “normal” while pushing cases further and further away, threatening anyone’s hopes of achieving justice.
 
The report explains: “The Huffington Post talked to half a dozen federal judges about how court vacancies and the lack of new judgeships affect their workloads. All of them said they feel like they’re underwater and desperately need more judges, but at the same time, they aren’t comfortable calling out Congress for failing to do its job. Many didn’t feel it appropriate for a judge to weigh in on legislative or political matters. So their situations don’t change.”
 
It includes: “For the most part, we’ve just resigned ourselves that this is our fate and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Judge Morrison England Jr., the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, which includes O’Neill’s Fresno division. “We’ve complained. We’ve begged. We’ve cajoled. We’ve done everything you can humanly do to try to get additional judgeships.” Yahoo adds that the Fresno division is among the hardest hit in the country, and even getting the allotted judges would not meet caseload demand.