Federal Courts and the Poor: Lack of Standards and Uniformity in Civil In Forma Pauperis Pleadings

Andrew Hammond, Pleading Poverty in Federal Court, Yale L. J. (forthcoming). Available at SSRN. Ezra Rosser In United States v. Kras, the Court rejected the argument that a poor person petitioning for protection from creditors should not have to pay a filing fee in order to access the bankruptcy system. The majority held that an able-bodied person could make the payment because the $50 fee was only $1.92 per week if spread over six months and $1.28 if spread over nine months. Justice Blackburn noted that such a fee at the time was “less than the price of a movie and little more than the cost of a pack or two of cigarettes.” Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissented, observing: It may be easy for some people to think that weekly savings of less than $2 are no burden. But no one who has had close contact with poor people can fail to understand how close to the margin of survival many of them are….A pack or two of cigarettes may be, for them, not a…

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