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Article
Traffic Courts
Justin Weinstein-Tull
112 California Law Review 1183 (2024)
 
Open Access  |  Library Access

Abstract:

Traffic courts are deeply important, but we know almost nothing about what goes on inside them. This is a problem for at least three reasons. First, traffic courts resolve over half of all cases brought into our justice system each year. Understanding how traffic courts work is thus crucial for understanding how courts themselves work. Second, traffic courts profoundly affect people’s lives. Monetary penalties from traffic court can cause people to go into debt sometimes so severe that it can take years to recover financially. Suspended driver’s licenses—another potential penalty—also have catastrophic effects on people’s livelihoods. Third, traffic courts occupy a key role in the justice system: they both sit atop our system of traffic policing and also fund state judicial branches and other state and local programs. Traffic courts enable a massive transfer of capital from motorists—disproportionately Black and Latino motorists—to the government. In short, if you care about courts, humans, or justice, you should care about traffic courts.

This Article provides the first comprehensive study of traffic courts. It makes four principal observations about their inner workings. First, traffic courts are diverse institutions—they vary by state—but some generalizations can be made. Second, traffic courts tend to be informal, lawyerless places that do not engage closely with procedural rules or other traditional indicia of legality. Third, traffic judges—often non-lawyers themselves—wield extraordinary discretion during proceedings. Fourth, traffic courts show us that our justice system is far less consistent and far more varied than we might imagine. Case outcomes rest more on lay notions of fairness than on legalistic guidance—a feature that carries the benefit of incorporating community norms into the legal system but also the risk of violating litigants’ rights.

Traffic courts also encourage us to think differently about the nature of the justice system. In particular, traffic courts present new categorical distinctions that we have not historically used to evaluate courts: between precedential and nonprecedential courts, and between more judicial and more administrative courts. This Article argues that these distinctions suggest novel ways to reform and oversee both traffic courts and the justice system more broadly.
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