The tyranny of civil court clerk delays
I'm sure that when a legislator looks at a new schedule of fees for motor vehicle violations, it seems sensible. e.g. $50 for 10mph over the limit, $100 for 20mph over, $200 for 30mph over, etc. I sometimes wonder if anyone in that decision making process worked through the math of all the other fees that get added on to every ticket, and seriously considered that they were actually saddling all three violations with $400+ tickets that are mostly indistinguishable. I open with this example because I expect most people are somewhat familiar with speeding tickets. My actual topic here is something a bit more niche but still conceptually related, procedural delays in civil court proceedings.
Massachusetts has laws establishing various timelines for parts of a civil court proceeding. Other states as well, but I'm going to focus on MA here since that's where most of my experience has been for the last few years. At some point, dozens of legislators (or their aides, at least, hopefully) looked at these laws in draft form and decided “yes, these are reasonable timelines for a person to wait between step X and step Y of the legal process”. They did this for many steps of many different processes, some very common and some very niche. However, they left some gaps, some intentionally and some unintentionally.
The next step in filling those gaps involves court rules and standing orders. The Supreme Judicial Court adopts rules that apply to each of the lower courts, e.g. the Superior Court and the Housing Court. Some of those rules are court-specific, and some apply to all of the Trial Courts. Then each individual court has its own leadership that issues standing orders. Between these various rules and orders, a lot more timelines are established, including small scale things like motion opposition deadlines and large scale things like “how long can a case take from start to finish?”.
However, there are still some gaps left after applying all of those layers of laws and rules and orders. And there is often little to no enforcement mechanism for those timelines. So we end up at the final layer of authority, the court clerk. As best I can tell, no one at a higher level intentionally allowed the clerk this much authority, it just fell into their lap through happenstance and tradition.
Here's an example: When a landlord is evicting a tenant, and every step of the decision process is complete, and the court has issued a final ruling that the tenant must leave, the tenant might still not leave. The landlord has to hire a sheriff to escort the tenant and their belongings from the property. The legislature has decided that the landlord has to wait 10 days after the court decision to get the paperwork for that next step (M.G.L. Chapter 239 Section 5 (a) “An execution upon a judgment rendered pursuant to section 3 shall not issue until the expiration of 10 days after the entry of the judgment”). I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable amount of time to the people writing and voting for that law. It matches the deadline for the tenant to file an appeal, and that makes plenty of sense. But here's the catch... there's no way to get that paperwork on day 11, or even on day 15. The court clerks have decided that the request for the paperwork can't be filed until day 11, and so it won't be considered or potentially granted for perhaps a week or a month after that.
Harkening back to the first paragraph, I don't think those legislators considered this. I'm pretty sure that they meant for landlords to wait 10 days, not 15 or 20 or 30 days. All of the laws and rules establishing timelines measured in days or weeks lose almost all meaning when the clerks deny any potential ability to pursue those ends without additional delays of weeks to months.
This is, of course, not limited to evictions or landlord/tenant law in general. I've encountered this situation in multiple courts at multiple levels on multiple types of cases. It continues to confound me that we tolerate this sort of obvious divergence from the intended effects of our laws about court processes.
PS: Maybe next time I write about clerk overreach it will be the tale of the SF Superior Court Appellate Division Clerk that refused to let me file an appeal because the court hadn't assigned a case number to my case or any other cases like mine.