Courts and Access to Justice: Counsel, Time, Evidence, and Public Remedy

A broad counsel guarantee may turn every hardship into federal litigation, increase delay, and displace local procedural experimentation. Court dashboards can invite crude rankings and political pressure. Limits on arbitration can enrich lawyers while producing little relief for claimants. Those risks justify a stakes-based guarantee, local delivery, audited metrics, fee discipline, aggregate relief standards, and early resolution options. They do not weaken the core conclusion: when government supplies the exclusive forum for enforcing rights, it owes a forum an ordinary person can use.

Taxpayers fund lawyers, courts, juries, interpreters, security, and technology. Judges and court administrators accept disclosure and performance review. Large employers, landlords, financial firms, and other repeat players lose some contractual control over forum and aggregation. Litigants face privacy and time costs even in an improved system. Clear coverage rules, proportional discovery, privacy tiers, fee shifting, and sanctions for abuse keep those burdens bounded. The guarantee assigns the heaviest obligation to institutions that control the forum or repeatedly use it at scale.