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Abstract: Traffic courts are deeply important, but we know almost nothing about what goes on inside them. There are at least three reasons to care. 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 work. Second, traffic courts have deep importance in people’s lives. Monetary penalties from traffic court can cause people to go into debt, sometimes so severe that it can take years to emerge. Suspended driver’s licenses—another potential penalty—have catastrophic effects on people’s lives and 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. They enable a massive transfer of capital from motorists—disproportionately Black and Latino motorists—to the government. In short, if you care about courts and the law, humans, or justice, you should care about traffic courts.
This Article provides the first comprehensive study of these courts. It demonstrates that traffic courts are diverse institutions—they vary state by state—but generalizations can be made. Traffic courts tend to be informal, lawyerless places, not particularly concerned with procedural rules or other traditional indicia of legality. Traffic judges—often non-lawyers themselves—wield extraordinary discretion. Traffic courts show us that our justice system is far less consistent and far more pluralist than we 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 ignoring well-established rights floors. 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new categorical distinctions that we have not historically used to evaluate courts: that between precedential and nonprecedential courts, and that between more judicial and more administrative courts. These distinctions suggest novel ways to reform and oversee both traffic courts and also the justice system more broadly.
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