TEN STEPS AMERICA CAN TAKE TO ENSURE DUE PROCESS AND EQUAL PROTECTION FOR UNREPRESENTED PARTIES.
1. The senior justice of every court shall ensure that each court maintain a website that has the procedural rules and the applicable for all cases to be heard in that court. Forms for use in every possible step of the procedural path of a case should be downloadable from the website.
2. Each court shall have a reading room where law books, forms and an Internet access terminal shall be available for unrepresented litigants.
3. Laws must be enacted at the state and federal level to guarantee due process and equal protection for unrepresented parties.
4. Laws, procedural rules, and decisions must be written in plain English at the level of a high school graduate.
5. Juries shall be read instructions to refrain from construing a party's non-representation against the unrepresented party.
6. Judges must refrain from refusing to allow an unrepresented party to speak on the grounds that the party is unrepresented.
7. Individuals with power of attorney or a certificate of corporate vote or trustee's authorization should be allowed to represent entities without being licensed members of the bar.
8. No person shall be denied the right to have assistance of counsel on the basis of the selected counsel not being licensed to practice law.
9. Each state shall have an office with its Court Administration system to be responsible for the co-ordination of pro se services and the monitoring of the rights of the rights of pro se litigants. Clerk's offices shall have made to be sensitive to the needs of pro-se litigants and shall distribute pre-printed information, syllabus and forms to litigants as is sensible.
10. Congress should take appropriate steps to ensure that federal courts are completely user friendly for unrepresented parties,that entities be permitted to have non-lawyer representatives and that discrimination against litigants who are unrepresented cease.It should be understood that discrimination may take many forms, ranging from being told "this is too complex for a non-lawyer, you'd better hire an attorney," to writing decisions that are incomprehensible for non-lawyers to understand.
