Courts Will Need to Adapt to the Coronavirus Crush
New legal aides and technologies can help justly process a wave of evictions, bankruptcies and domestic disputes.
All rise, and please mute yourself.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
The time of coronavirus has been a time of reckonings — about the perils of political polarization, a diminished public sector and America’s unfinished project of civil rights. But there is a further reckoning that will soon play out, not in our hospitals, but in our courts: the legal system’s declining capacity to provide justice to ordinary Americans.
That reckoning begins in Michigan this week with the lifting of the moratorium pausing eviction cases, ordered by Governor Gretchen Whitmer in March as Covid-19 spread. When her order expires Thursday, Michigan’s courts are expecting a deluge of 75,000 eviction cases.