shlep: the Self-Help Law ExPress

Thanks to the recent bursting of the housing bubble, we find that many of the pro se patrons who come to our library do so seeking help fighting foreclosure.

For Californians, one helpful document, A Self-Help Guide to Preventing Foreclosure, can be found here.  This document is provided by the California Senior Legal Hotline and Legal Services of Northern California.  LINK FIXED

The American Bar Association has published a page of useful links to Foreclosure Resources and Information.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development also provides a useful page of recourses entitled “Guide to Avoiding Foreclosure.”

I’m so sorry that Tammy and I allowed this wonderful blog to flounder for two years as we both got settled into our new jobs on the west coast. The good news is that I am ready to get re-involved and will be including my staff here in the Instruction and Research Services department at the University of La Verne College of Law in wonderful, sunny, downtown Ontario, California.

I will do my utmost to have a fresh, spanking new post for SHLEP by the end of this weekend, and will begin the process of freshening up. I hope we can bring this sleeping resource back online so that it can be as helpful as it once was.

And thanks to the wonderful people at the Harvard Law School who were working late and helped me remember how to log in!

Terry

At long last, Shlep is returning from its long hiatus.  As Terry and myself adjusted to new jobs, we ran into some difficulties balancing the time commitment of our new positions with the necessity of frequent, useful and accurate blog posts.  However, we are now ready to roll, and you can expect new posts in about two weeks and then regularly thereafter.  See you soon!

On July 6, the 9th Circuit held in United States v. Forrester that Mark Forrester did not knowingly waive his 6th amendment right to counsel where the trial court judge did not adequately explain the charges against Forrester or the possible penalties he faced.

According to the Metropolitan-News Enterprise,  Forrester had been charged with “conspiring to manufacture and distribute” Ecstasy.  A year into the case, Forrester filed a motion to defend himself.  From the Metropolitan-News:

At the hearing on his motion, U.S. District Judge Thomas J. Whelan of the Southern District of California repeatedly warned Forrester that defendants who represent themselves rarely succeed.

His remarks included the admonishment, “I want to unequivocally tell you and strongly recommend to you that you don’t do this. In most cases it’s a disaster.” He also told Forrester that “in all cases it is not a good idea for a nonlawyer to oppose a lawyer in a criminal trial.”

Though he did offer caveats, Whelan did not inform the defendant of the charge against him. He also told Forrester incorrectly that he faced a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years to life in prison when, in fact, he faced no minimum sentence and a maximum of 20 years behind bars.

After Forrester gave repeated assurances that he was “coherent,” “literate,” and aware of the consequences of self-representation, Whelan granted his motion to appear pro se at trial as well as at some of the post-trial proceedings.

At a follow-up hearing in March, the judge addressed various concerns pertaining to Forrester’s self-representation, but again did not talk about the charge against him. Nor did he correct his previous error about the potential sentence Forrester faced.

The Court noted the high burden placed on the government in waiver of counsel cases and found the fact that the trial judge did not specify the charges particularly damaging.  The Court also found it irrelevant that the trial judge had actually overstated the possible penalities that Forrester faced. 

I just discovered a wonderful self-help web-site, sponsored by the Council of California Law Librarians, called Your Public Law Library.  The site covers California in depth, but it also has information for other states.  The site includes information on self-help centers, guidance for legal research, including a mini-research class, and on-line reference services.

Best of all, the site is available in eight languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Japanese, and Korean.

The Montana Public Interest Law Blog had an interesting article recently on one of the trickiest rules of evidence: relevance.  The author was inspired to write the post because, as a new prosecutor in a small town, he often sees people losing minor court cases because they don’t understand the rules of evidence.  

The article is a great overview of the relevance rule, putting it in simple, easy-to-understand language while also deciphering some of its complexities.  The author writes only on the Federal Rules of Evidence, however.  As he points out, anyone going into the courtroom should make sure to check their state rules as well, because sometimes there are major differences. 

While trolling the news for useful information to post on shlep, I came across this blog post at Consumerist.com.  It advises people who are being pursued by debt collectors to make sure that the company who is trying to collect really owns the debt that it’s claiming the person owes.  They also point to this great article offering tips for people being sued by debt collecters over at Alabama Consumer Law Blog. 

I have heard about Consumerist before, but today was the first time I visited their web-site, and I highly recommend it.  They analyze new products, discuss the customer service of various companies, and as the above article indicates, offer useful tips for consumers who are dealing with various sorts of problems related to buying and selling.  It’s a great web-site for all things related to consumer rights.

A quick perusal of the archives showed pages dealing with debt collection, early termination fees, fraud, and identity theft, and much more.  You can also send them tips when a company treats you unfairly.  Check it out. 

An interesting issue arising in some custody battles in recent years is something called Parental Alienation Syndrome.  As described in this article, PAS is a not-yet-officially recognized “ailment,” inflicted upon children by custodial parents during and/or after divorce.  Basically, PAS occurs when the parent who has greater access to the child uses that access to negatively influence that child’s feelings about the other parent.

Although doctors and psychiatrists are in dispute about the validity of PAS, it is arising in custody cases more and more often.  Still, it can be difficult to prove PAS because the lack of official recognition makes it difficult or impossible to secure expert testimony on the subject. 

This is one of those areas where the law seems, to me, hopelessly out of touch with people’s day to day lives.   In order to get evidence of PAS admitted into court, it must be a scientific syndrome, described and analyzed in technical language and supported by empirical studies.  Yet ordinary people know that, whether or not it rises to the level of a syndrome, the concept of parental alienation exists.

Unfortunately for children of divorce, many parents are unable to control their anger at one another when their marriage fails.  Even more unfortunately, one parent may take out this anger by manipulating the child into blaming or disliking the other parent.  Does the court really need to see studies showing that this type of behavior is harmful to the parent-child relationship?   

At any rate, I thought this was a useful issue for shlep discussion because I suspect that pro se patrons who are dealing with child custody issues often worry about the influence the other parent is having on the child’s feelings.  It might be helpful to these people to learn more about PAS and its effects, even if they aren’t ultimately able to get everything into the courtroom.

The California Conference on Self-Represented Litigants has posted its conference materials, and there is a wealth of valuable information for self-help practitioners.  Topics covered include helping pro-se litigants with mental health problems, helping pro-se litigants with limited english-speaking skills, mediating between pro se litigants, how to start a self-help center, how to communicate more clearly with pro se litigants and much much more. 

nbsp;EARTHtimes.org is reporting that today Bank of America expanded a pro bono effort it has been working on since 2005 by

partnering with Sanctuary for Families, Neighborhood Entrepreneur Law Project, Volunteers of Legal Service, New York Family Court, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, and several major law firms to help ensure the legal needs of the city’s underserved and vulnerable are met.

The project will be centered in New York City.  In developing the program, Bank of America consulted with its New York Legal Department for information about issues and causes of interest as well as time constraints on the lawyers. 

Of special interest to shlep readers: One project that Bank of America lawyers will be participating in is the Self-Represented Legal Services Project at Brooklyn Family Court, covered by shlep previously here and here. 

In 2005, the American Association of Law Libraries held a Joint Roundtable on Service to Pro Se Patrons and Prisoners at their annual meeting.  As a part of that roundtable, they conducted an email survey, in which law libraries with pro se programs described their programs and any associated costs.

I have attached the results of that survey, which includes information from respondents in the following states: California, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.  Note that I updated the original results, deleting any links that no longer worked.

Pro Se Programs in Law Libraries

The Edwardsville Intelligencer, the main newspaper for Madison County, IL, is reporting that the Madison County Law Library, located in the county courthouse basement, has opened a new self-help center to assist pro se patrons with navigating the court system.

The center will be staffed by court officials as well as Chief Judge Ann Callis for 15 hours a week.  It’s major focus seems to be on helping users to understand the basics of going to court such as how to behave and the roles of various court officials, as opposed to substantive legal matters. 

Although a more substantive program would likely prove more helpful, the new self-help center is certainly a start in a county with a poverty rate of 11.2%.

Legal research guides, sometimes called “pathfinders,” are exactly what they sound like – guides to legal research. A number of different organizations publish these guides, but a consistent source for particularly thorough and helpful guides is academic law libraries. As a new academic law librarian myself, I consistently use the guides published on the web-sites of other law schools when researching an unfamiliar topic. Almost every academic law library publishes them to some extent or another, and they can be a great resource for pro se patrons in learning how to find things like cases, laws, regulations – or even just in developing a research strategy when you don’t know where to begin.

If you need help with a particular type of problem, try googling for a research guide. For example, say you are going through a divorce – try googling “family law” and “research guide” or “family law” and “pathfinder.” I just tried the first search, and a number of helpful options came up.

If you need to find something more directly about your state (and most of the time, that is the case), you could try adding the name of the state to your search. Another, and probably more helpful, option, is to go to the home page for an academic law library in your state. Most such law libraries will have state specific, as well as more general, research guides, but they may not appear in Google. Because each law library works differently, you will probably have to poke around the web-site to see where the research guides are located, but usually, they are listed in the “Reference” or “Search” section of a given law library’s homepage.

As an example, check out the research guides on the UCLA Law Library web-page, which cover a variety of California and federal topics.

An article in the June 4th edition of Missouri Lawyer’s Weekly discusses the recent debate in the state legal community over the Missouri Supreme Court’s proposed rules for assisting pro se litigants through the court system.

The proposed rules would allow court clerks to provide information and forms to pro se litigants.  Proponents argue that the help is badly needed, but opponents say the proposed rules are tantamount to allowing the unauthorized practice of law.  Some also argue that the court system is simply too overstrained already to take on this new task:

“The crux of the issue is therefore whether the court system should put itself in a situation of straining its already inadequate resources and modifying its traditional role in the legal system (not by merely judging, but by assisting litigants) so that individuals may accomplish, without a lawyer, a task which is admittedly best performed with a lawyer,” the Clay County association said in the letter.

“‘To hell with poor people’; that’s what that paragraph says to me,” said St. Louis County Circuit Judge Dennis Smith. “‘Courts exist for the rich. ‘ I don’t believe that. If you are poor and can’t afford an attorney, what are you supposed to do? I’m open to suggestion if any other attorney in the state has an idea of how to help these people.

 The comment period for the proposed rules ends July 1.