Civil court closures will have lasting impact: Gerald Sauer’s article for The Daily Journal

COVID-19 has turned the world as we know it upside-down, but it has done quite a number on the civil court system. In its rush to close courts to protect public health, the California Judicial Council and the Los Angeles County courts have set civil litigants back to a point from which it will be difficult to recover.

Relegated to the back of the line behind “essential” matters such as criminal, delinquency, dependency, family and mental health matters, civil trials have effectively gone into la-la land. It could be years before people who have been injured see justice. Civil cases that would have been resolved in two years will now likely drag on for more than four years. The result will be not just ongoing financial hardship for people who have suffered real injuries and deserve to be restored to pre-injury economic status, but mental and emotional trauma that we’ll see playing out into the foreseeable future: higher levels of addiction, suicide, domestic violence and self-abuse.

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