Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP

Kelly Dermody and Other Bar Leaders Call on Legislature to Spare Courts from Further Budget Cuts

Over the past several years, funding for California courts has been slashed in an effort to help reduce California's budget deficit. As explained in an editorial in today's Los Angeles Times, we can not afford any further cuts to our court system:

"Police, criminal laws, and prisons are pointless without courts for adjudication and sentencing. Regulating or deregulating business is pointless if there are insufficient courtrooms to adjudicate business disputes, consumer complaints, and regulatory matters. Police cannot protect endangered spouses or children without domestic violence protection orders, and those must come from courts.

The average citizen may go years without entering a courthouse except to serve on a jury or pay a traffic ticket. It's difficult sometimes — for people who aren't lawyers, litigants, crime victims, or others who know their way around the courts — to remember that the justice system is not merely another government agency but rather an essential branch in its own right that balances the Legislature and the executive and makes a society of laws actually work.

These are real issues today. The Los Angeles County Superior Court has closed some courtrooms, but the big cuts are looming — unless the trigger finger is loosened and some previous spending cuts are reversed. Elsewhere in California, the failure of justice is more immediate. When domestic violence protection orders are available only a few days a week, as senior court officials say is the case in some parts of the state, people otherwise protected can be injured or killed. Backlogs of child custody cases, due to the closure of dependency courts, can leave children without an adult with legal authority to parent them."

The editorial follows upon a rally in Los Angeles last week organized by the Open Courts Coalition, which is headed by Los Angeles attorney Paul R. Kiesel and Burlingame lawyer Niall McCarthy, the President of the Consumer Attorneys of California. The coalition calls on the Legislature to keep court funding intact and gradually restore the $350 million that has been cut in recent years. Speakers at the rally included former Governor Gray Davis and former state Supreme Court Justice Carlos Moreno.

Lieff Cabraser partner and Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF) President Kelly Dermody attended the rally with other officers of BASF to offer support and help raise awareness of the impact of court budget cuts. Ms. Dermody stated to the media that BASF has "realized through our courts, our clients, and our services, that if we don't step forward and let people know [the lack of court funding] is a threat to basic human services, no one else is going to do it."