Justice of the War and Peace

A wedding, an eviction, and a $6,000 fight over a security deposit walk into a bar… Wait no they don’t. They walk into a Justice of the Peace Court. Where else can you find a party like that? There is no joke in this scenario, but there is a punchline, and the punchline is the licensed attorney.

JP Court is a party. It’s the Wild West. It’s where ordinary folks go to do their worst. The rules of law don’t apply, just a good sense of right and wrong. Sounds fun, right? Sometimes it is. The ends of justice in JP court say to hell with the means. Feeling litigious today? Go down to a JP Court and fill out their complaint form. What you write doesn’t even have to be coherent. You can ramble on about the woes of society without citing a single law or statute, name the person you hate at the top, and file the complaint right there with the person behind the desk. Sue someone, anyone! Feeling lucky? Sue a few people. So long as you limit yourself to asking for less than $20,000, JP Court will accept your case.

When you get your scheduled trial date and you arrive, usually a coarsely put together family will be there hovering over an 18-year-old niece in a white dress, next to her disheveled fiancé, and the JP Court judge will crack a joke like hey lady are you sure? After this, it’ll be too late. Everyone in the courtroom will chuckle, including the guy in the cheap seats who has no idea that in about thirty minutes he’ll be called up to the same spot as the fiancé, as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by Shady Oaks Apartment Complex to evict his ass and collect $7,000 in back rent. He may laugh at the judge’s quips right now, but he ought to know, he’s about to be punted, and he, in this moment, really has no idea how hard it will be from here on out, forever, for him to find a decent apartment to live in.

The worst and best thing about JP Court is, as I said, that you can sue someone all by yourself. You don’t need a stinking lawyer. You can bring all your evidence, and, time permitting, you can show it all to the judge, if he or she is interested in seeing it. You can meander on about this or that, go off the rails, come back on, and then ask for thousands of dollars. Rules be damned, anything goes.

Why is this bad? Because I’m a lawyer. It’s good for you, the non-lawyer. Or so you think. In reality, if you try to do this yourself—suing someone without the help of a lawyer—and you do go up against a person represented by a lawyer, your chances are not very good. You don’t know this of course, but hell, what do you have to lose, you’re trying this case yourself. You’re not paying an attorney. Maybe you’ve prepared your case while you “work from home”, and this is your “side-hustle.” The person you’re suing is paying attorney’s fees to defend your lawsuit, and, even if you lose your shirt, you can find solace in the fact that you forced the other side to spend thousands of dollars to hire an attorney to be here at trial today.

And to use “trial” here is a generous word. Think Judge Judy. Two people barking back and forth about how the other side did them wrong, while the judge interjects a steady voice of civility so that both sides can go off the rails again and drive the TV ratings up. Judge Judy is in fact set up to emulate a JP Court where both sides are representing themselves, known as “pro se representation.”

I was in JP Court a few months ago representing a client. My client was being sued by a 50-year-old man-child who never takes off his Air Force Veteran ballcap. He was the most prepared plaintiff ever. He was more prepared than most of the lawyers I run into in court. But guess what? He lost. He had a stack of exhibits three inches thick. He recorded my client in a conversation (very shady), and thanks to the fact that the Rules of Evidence don’t apply, he got to play the recording, from his phone.

But he did not get to the point, he didn’t know how to organize his exhibits, he meandered, and he said many things that, while they were important to him, they were in no way relevant to whether or not he had a binding agreement with my client. And this annoyed the judge. Because when the guy finally got to the point, it was readily apparent he did not have a contract with my client. Just like I tried to tell him before the trial. And the judge told him as much, too, once it was all said and done. “Buddy,” the judge started in, “I see how prepared you are, but do you know what a contract is? Do you know what a breach of contract lawsuit entails? You need, among other things, an offer, acceptance, consideration exchanged, performance, and damages. You can’t prove you had any of that.”

So he lost. We won. It is not anything near worth gloating about. To fight this silly lawsuit against a guy who thought he could win a case all on his own without an attorney, my client had to pay me a couple thousand dollars. And I certainly had better things to do than to go up to court to defend this silly lawsuit.

But, despite what you may think, none of this makes me mad. That’s what JP Court is for. It’s to try to do “justice.” Rules of law and evidence, in JP Court anyway, are not as important as doing “justice”, whatever "justice" means that day. I kind of like that idea, and as a life philosophy, I think it’s healthy.

If you lose at JP Court, as the judge will tell you, you can appeal the case to “big boy” or “big girl” court, a/k/a county court, in the big fancy courthouse located in the city that is the county seat.

But just know, in big boy court, the Rules of Evidence apply. And if you want to fight this again, you might want to hire a lawyer. You have 21 days from the date of JP Court judgment to appeal a case.

Do you know what man-child-Air-Force-Veteran-ballcap-guy did on the 20th day? You got it. He appealed. And we went to county court to fight it all over again. And you know what else? He didn’t hire an attorney for county court either. So you won't be surprised to know that when I got to county court and the guy still did not have a lawyer I asked him, “hey, has anything changed? Why are we here in county court? And do you have a lawyer this time?”

“Nothing’s changed,” he replies.

“Then why are we here?” I ask.

“Because I’m right," he says. “Because I’m right,” he says again, his face scrunching up as he looks and points at my client, “and he’s wrong.”

Ah, indeed. If only it were about right and wrong.