“Civil procedure” is what lawyers and judges call the elaborate game of suing somebody. The process would be familiar to anybody who’s been through a 70-minute call with the phone company to dispute some outrageous charge on their bill. Except it is longer by many orders of magnitude, so complicated that the U.S. Supreme Court (which helps craft the rules) can’t agree on how it’s supposed to go, and not at all set up to be understood by ordinary people.

A distressing example of how bad it can get turned up at the Idaho Court of Appeals recently, in Hauschulz v. State, No. 31631 (Idaho Ct. App. Oct. 20, 2006) (32 KB PDF). Travis Hauschulz, who’s apparently in prison in Idaho right now, says that a guard in the South Idaho Correctional Institution wrongfully took his radio, power strip, and calendar. So he wrote a letter to the Ada County Clerk and attached a document he called a “Tort Claim.” He wrote:

Dear Clerk:

This is my attempt to file a Tort Claim under Idaho Tort Claims Act. I have no access to Idaho Law, so I hope this court will accept my complaint/claim?

I am incarcerated still, in the state of Kansas, and will need help to serve the summons upon the Secretary of State. I am filing a Forma Pauperis in case there is a filing fee or any service fees? I am unable to send a printout of my inmate account. This facility requires a court order for the information.

I hope this is everything you need?

Thank you for your help!

Sincerely,
Travis Hauschulz

This was in April 2002. For the rest of the summer, this guy kept writing back to the Ada County Clerk’s office, trying to find out if his claim had been filed. Finally, in August, a deputy clerk wrote him back, returning all of Mr. Haushulz’s documents because “the Tort Claim is not an original. You must submit an original document with original signatures.”

He tried again. Then, in Feburary 2003, the clerk’s office let him know: a “Tort (Notice of Claim) should be duly filed with the Secretary of State instead of the County.” He wrote the Secretary of State’s office, which told him that it had no authority over the judicial branch of Idaho’s government. Now, exasperated, Travis resent his original cover letter and “Tort Claim,” underlining the word “complaint” in the letter and asking “Am I wrong by listing or naming my complaint a Tort Claim? If so, wouldn’t this court clearly understand my obvious intensions?” The clerk’s office, always helpful, let him know that “A tort claim is not a complaint. Should you wish to file a complaint, it should be presented in the proper form and with the proper filing fee. Our office would be happy to accept and file a complaint meeting those criteria.” Oh.

Hauschulz retitled his “Tort Claim” as a “Complaint” and sent it in. The clerk filed it. And so now Travis got his day in court, right? Of course not! The State of Idaho moved to dismiss the case, arguing that the two-year statute of limitations deadline for filing the complaint had passed, and it won.

The Court of Appeals straightened all of this out, thankfully. It hardly needed any discussion at all to point out that this kind of “gotcha” foolery is also known as bullshit. Just the court’s (clever) first couple sentences of analysis alone could have made the point: “The state in this case filed a motion to dismiss under Idaho Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6). However, because matters outside the pleadings were presented, the motion to dismiss was converted into a motion for summary judgment under I.R.C.P. 56(c).” That’s right—the same trial court that dismissed Hauschulz’s case because he didn’t use the right C-word was willing to hear what the state had to say even though its highly-paid attorneys couldn’t caption their filings correctly, either. So now, five years after Travis lost his radio and stuff, he finally gets to have a court actually decide whether that was illegal.

There’s a lot going on with this: judicial bias against prisoner-litigants, judicial bias against self-represented litigants generally, court clerk anxiety about improperly giving “advice,” and the phenomenon where bureaucratic procedures make intelligent people just a little too rigid. And the incomprehensibility of the procedural rules. In other words, as with phone company customer service, there’s a big problem but lots of easy ways to reform it.