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The introduction presents the rationale and structure of the book. This book focuses litigation and litigation reform proposals, as opposed to liability reform (i.e., reform of the underlying substantive legal rules). In particular, it focuses on lowering litigation costs, in part in order to promote greater access to the courts, and thereby to advance the book’s articulated vision of civil justice. The book is aimed especially at policymakers and thought leaders on the subject.

It seems that no description of the civil dispute resolution process in the legal system is complete without a catalogue of its attendant problems: the burgeoning cost of legal services, inequality of resources between litigants, crippling pre-trial delays, lengthy trials, discovery abuses, and morally dubious tactical devices all feature regularly in such accounts. Many individuals and organisations grapple daily with the question of how to tackle these problems. Theories abound as to the best prescriptions for effective reform. This chapter discusses some proposals for change. The reforms discussed are proposed by, or under the consideration of the Queensland Litigation Reform Commission. The chapter is divided into two parts. First, it canvasses the Commission's and the proposed procedural reforms, together with the practical benefits which are expected to flow from them. Secondly, it explains the ethical basis for the suggested reforms.

This concluding chapter highlights how the strengths and weaknesses of court-based reform and community organizing mirror each other, and how neither type of advocate is likely to single-handedly realize students’ right to a high quality education. This raises the question: Why don’t litigators and community organizers work together more to realize the educational rights they aim to achieve? The chapter identifies some of the challenges and opportunities such collaborations present, and it draws upon what worked well in Kentucky to consider how potential barriers can be overcome with a focus on the policy implementation stage. Even when such collaborations come together, a moral dilemma remains: if local advocacy does not have broader impact, a premium is placed on the community into which children happen to be born and educated. The chapter concludes by emphasizing how local control of education policy is a significant obstacle to the realization of educational rights in the US, and highlights some promising shifts in federal policy that suggest openings for reform on this front.

This chapter provides an overview of the Prison Litigation Reform Act within the context of the skyrocketing prison population and advances in legal-rights consciousness. The authors show that the predicted decline in prisoner litigation subsequent to the PLRA never occurred; instead, there was a dramatic increase in prisoner grievance filing. The chapter describes how the grievance system in California works, describes the range of grievances filed, quotes from actual grievances, and presents the best available estimates of outcome numbers. It concludes by pointing out that despite the slim odds of prisoners winning a grievance, this system that was mandated by Congress to curtail legal mobilization by prisoners arguably animates their rights consciousness.

This chapter examines four separate substantive issues, leading to a consideration of the intersection between international human rights law and mental disability law through varying perspectives: law school education; the limits of expert testimony; the private law question of a psychotherapist’s duty to warn, and corrections law. Although these issues appear to have little in common, I conclude that the same overarching factors discussed previously and subsequently—the role of sanism and pretextuality, and the importance and promise of therapeutic jurisprudence—play a major role in any analysis of these disparate issues. Although—with the modest exception of corrections law—there has been very little scholarly literature about the intersection between international human rights law and these substantive legal questions, it is hoped that, as time goes on (and especially in light of the ratification of the CRPD), we will come more readily to see the significance of this intersection.

The epilogue reflects on what happened to the prisoners who brought civil suits to Texas and frames the legal and political legacy of Ruiz within the current political moment of national prison strikes and the ongoing struggle over mass incarceration. The chapter considers Ruiz’s legacy through the lens of the Tennessee prison hostage crisis of 1985 as well as ongoing contemporary prisoner politicization over mass incarceration. It considers the development of the Prison Litigation Reform Act as part of carceral federalism’s effort to overturn judicial intervention in favor a return to state’s rights and control of its prison systems. It concludes with an analysis the country’s first national prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 as critical moments tied to Ruiz and the case’s political legacy.

Chapter 3 introduces the central theoretical framework of the book and argues that it is the advent of the prisoners’ rights movement and inmates’ use of litigation that prompted the rise of private carceral institutions. The author reviews the historical development of prisoners’ rights and the massive increase in inmate litigation before developing a set of hypotheses about how lawsuits influence the adoption of private prisons. The author argues that a higher number of inmate lawsuits make a state more likely to privatize its carceral facilities to avoid legal and political accountability for poor prison conditions. Alternatively, the second hypothesis argues that an increase in the number of court orders against a state will make a state less likely to privatize. Because the judicial decrees are effectively forcing states to develop coherent rules and standards, the incentive to privatize to limit accountability is removed.