At its core, preserving access to justice means upholding the Constitution, separation of powers, and the courts’ role in our nation. Those guarantees should be automatic, but they require vigilance and action. For example, President Bush claimed that the war on terror gave him unlimited power, exempt from court review, to imprison U.S. citizens and foreign nationals indefinitely by designating them “enemy combatants.”  Then he created new military commissions to try them with secret evidence and tried to wipe out their habeas corpus rights – court review explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. Rejecting these efforts, the U.S Supreme Court said, “The Executive is bound to comply with the Rule of Law.” Nonetheless, some with power flout the courts’ role.

That’s where we come in.

The Constitution protects access to justice by preserving individuals' rights in the courts, too.  More than 40 years ago, the Supreme Court held in Gideon v. Wainwright that the Constitution protects the right to counsel for the poor in criminal cases.  The Legal Services Corporation was created to protect the right to counsel in civil cases. The right to a jury trial is explicitly protected by the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  Both rights, however, are now endangered. 

WHAT PUBLIC JUSTICE IS DOING

Public Justice is dedicated to upholding the Constitution and preserving the courts’ role.  We joined amici curiae briefs urging the Supreme Court to ensure access to justice – and the judiciary’s critical role – in all of the key “enemy combatant” cases. We also won a key victory preserving victims’ rights, and the role of the courts, when the Maryland Legislature passed measures trying to retroactively eliminate HMO members’ rights and validate the HMOs’ illegal double-billing.  At our urging, Maryland’s highest court held the legislation unconstitutional. 
 
Public Justice also helped repel assaults on the right to counsel and jury trial. With a coalition of public interest groups, we joined amici curiae briefs that helped persuade the Supreme Court to reject the most dangerous challenge in decades to legal services for the poor. We also helped defeat a crucial challenge to the right to jury trial and were gratified when the Supreme Court of Iowa ruled that there is no “complexity exception” to that rule; the right to trial by jury cannot be taken away just because a case is complicated.  And we successfully challenged a new tactic for eliminating the right to jury trial – companies including waivers of the right to jury trial in their form agreements.   

See our Constitution Case Index to learn how our work is succeeding.

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