THE SELF‐REPRESENTED LITIGANT: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE BENCH AND BAR

It is widely accepted that the number of self‐represented litigants has skyrocketed nationwide, especially in family law cases. Although nationwide comprehensive data on the number of self‐represented litigants do not exist, anecdotal evidence supports the belief that self‐representation is increasing. The challenge for courts and the entire legal profession is how to respond. Most observers in Indiana would agree that the traditional model of family law litigation—both spouses represented by lawyers settling their disputes before a judge—is no longer the norm in family law cases. Judges face a dilemma: assisting a self‐represented litigant to level the playing field against a represented party is seen by many as violating impartiality, even if the assistance is rendered to create a just result. In an effort to address the situation, the Indiana Supreme Court created the Pro Se Advisory Committee in April 2001. This article explores the long‐range implications of the issue of self‐represented litigants on Indiana's court system in hope that it will provide some insight for other jurisdictions. The first part of the article addresses the numbers of self‐represented litigants by tracking growth or declines in self‐represented cases and assessing whether there are any pockets of self‐represented litigants geographically or in certain case types. The second part of the article puts Indiana into context with the rest of the nation and reviews national trends. The third section reviews Indiana's response to self‐represented litigants over the last decade. The fourth section reviews current and ongoing projects in Indiana. The article concludes that the issue of self‐represented litigants will not fade away and that the challenge that guides the legal profession is how we provide equal access to justice for all who enter our courthouses.     

Environmental Considerations for Trauma‐Responsive Juvenile and Family Courts: A Review of the Literature with Recommendations for Practice

Juvenile and family courts serve some of our most vulnerable populations, many of whom have experienced some traumatic event. People suffering with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are known to be more sensitive to environmental stimuli, and many of the environmental conditions within courts can be challenging for those suffering traumatic stress. Trauma‐responsive practices help foster conditions of healing, which can benefit both the court user and those who work within the court. Research reviewed in this article demonstrates the likelihood of negative behavioral and emotional responses to specific environmental factors for people suffering PTSD and other stress reactions, and offers recommendations to minimize environmental stressors.     

Today was not a good day: offender accounts of the incidents that led to their admission to drug court

One method that has been touted to help end mass incarceration is using intermediate sanctions. While intermediate sanctions often present as attractive options, there is evidence that as practiced, these sanctions often result in net widening. One of the most common forms of intermediate sanctions are drug courts, which are often viewed as progressive alternatives to locking up people with substance abuse problems. However, along with the dangers of net widening, scholars have shown that many people admitted to drug courts do not seem to have substance abuse problems and could benefit from lesser criminal justice interventions. In the current study, we analyzed intake data from a drug court to determine: (1) what charge(s) drug participants had and (2) how they became involved with the criminal justice system. Among important findings were that a large number of drug court participants were arrested for the possession of one drug only (often marijuana) and that more than half of participants came to the attention of the criminal justice system through a traffic stop rather than through repeated encounters with the criminal justice system.     

Race,Crime, and Criminal Justice

Fifty years ago, the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice under President Johnson did not frequently mention race and ethnicity in its discussion of and recommendations for the criminal justice system, but it did have a lot to say about race and crime. Through the use of arrest rates to measure racial differentials in criminal involvement, the Commission concluded that Blacks commit more crime as a consequence of Black people living in greater numbers in criminogenic “slum” conditions. To address racial differences, the Commission favored the Great Society programs of Johnson's War on Poverty. Contemporary criminologists continue to debate the racial distribution of crime, the causes of crimes, and the best policies to reduce crime and racial differentials. The Commission did not anticipate the current debate among scholars regarding how much racial disproportionality exists in the criminal justice system and its causes and consequences. The policies that led to mass incarceration have been significant drivers of continued criminal justice racial disparity. Those policies are inconsistent with the recommendation in The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967), upending the pursuit of a more fair and just system.     

Specialized Domestic Violence Courts

Abstract

The multimethod study assesses the perceptions of specialized domestic violence courts' processes with victims' experiences as the central focus. Perceptions of the traditional courts and specialized domestic violence courts are compared among victims, courtroom police, attorneys, judges and victim advocates. Domestic violence education among attorneys, judges, and victim advocates is also compared. Despite the intended improvements with the specialized court model, victims report similar problems in both court models. Safety and victims support among respondents is mixed. Professionals from the specialized court receive no more domestic violence education than those from the general court. Victims' and courtroom police recommendations are presented.     

环境公益诉讼的性质识别、原告寻找与审理机关专门化

环境公益诉讼因缺乏有力立法支撑,处于一种司法实践先于立法的混乱局面。从对2007年1012年国内公开报道的30起环境公益诉讼案件的司法裁判文书进行实证研究发现：环境公益诉讼无论诉讼目的还是救济方式均不同于传统诉讼,它是在原有诉讼体系上“重生”的一种新型诉讼;为实现维护环境公益的目的,这样一种新型诉讼的原告资格应赋予公民个人、环保团体、环境行政机关及检察机关,并且应由专门审判机关进行审理。     

My Country,My Country,directed by Laura Poitras,produced by Jocelyn Glatzer and Laura Poitras Iraq in Fragments,directed by James Longley,produced by John Sinno and James Longley

A new form of “entertaining news,” accessed by most through television, has become a privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries “beyond the West” in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. What are the political consequences of this development: What is the relationship between media and politics in these regions? We answer these questions through a case study of India, the world's largest democracy, where two decades of media expansion and liberalization have yielded the largest number of commercial television news outlets in the world. We show why prevailing theories of media privatization and commercialization cannot account for the distinctive architecture of media systems in places like India. In this article, we first provide an overview of the historical and contemporary dynamics of media liberalization in India and the challenges that this poses to existing models and typologies of the media-politics relationship. We then present a new typology of media systems and a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between television news and democratic politics in India, and by extension in the global South. In the concluding section, we reflect on the broader comparative insights of the essay and discuss directions for future research. We believe that our alternative comparative framework captures more meaningfully the diversity and complexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice in these regions.     

When success is an orphan: informal institutional governance and the EU–Turkey deal

This article traces the role of the EU institutions in the process leading up to the EU–Turkey Action Plan and EU–Turkey Statement. The EU–Turkey deal is the proverbial ‘orphan’ in EU crises management, with none of the key actors and institutions eager to claim ownership. Yet when judged from the perspective of process management, the deal resulted from effective inter-institutional collaboration, which stands in stark contrast to the EU’s handling of the relocation schemes or the Dublin reform. Using insights from the informal governance literature, the article maps the inter-institutional network that managed this process, traces the activities within the network, and determines the effects these had on the final outcome. On an analytical level, the mechanism contains five key elements of informal institutional governance: linking, bridging, shielding, laying out the tracks and creative fixes. The conclusion reflects on the wider applicability and scope conditions of this mechanism.     

Party research: Western European bias and the ‘African labyrinth’

For a long time Africa's political parties have been neglected in political science research, although they have mushroomed during the last decade and are being seen as crucial for the democratic development of the continent. Part of the neglect was due to the very specific western European bias of political science party research, while Africanists claimed the uniqueness of the subject. Despite this bias, the article argues that the framework of established party research can be applied to African parties as well – provided that some modifications are considered. These necessary modifications are explained for four ‘fields’, namely the functionalist approach, the cleavage model, the inclusion of informal politics, and finally whether a distinctively ‘African’ or a universal party typology approach should be applied.     

Autocratic checks and balances? Trust in courts and bureaucratic discretion

An emerging literature in political economy focuses on democratic enclaves or pockets of quasi-democratic decision-making embedded in non-democracies. This article first explores the factors that may lead to the emergence of such institutional checks and balances in autocratic politics. I use the comparative analysis of courts in Morocco and Tunisia, and argue that interest group mobilization and the centrality of legalism in political development have been essential for the existence of “governance” enclaves. Second, I explore whether such checks effectively contain everyday rent-seeking, as well as the theoretical channels through which this may occur. Findings from firm-level surveys conducted in Morocco and Tunisia in 2013 indicate that higher general trust in courts, even in modest relative terms, rendered businesses significantly less vulnerable to tax corruption in Tunisia, in sharp contrast to the Moroccan case.