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Courts and taxes | 102 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Courts and taxes
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 09 2012 @ 06:15 PM EDT

Most courts (in the US and elsewhere) are paid for by user fees, there are fees for filing lawsuits, for court resources used in court cases etc. At the end of a case (sometimes earlier) the court rules which side(s) should pay the fee and if one side should pay (some) of the other sides lawyer fees too. One of those sides may be a tax-funded entity such as a district attorney's office, but that doesn't change the principle. In criminal cases there are sometimes rules where the government actually pays for both sides (In the US, police is required to mention this whenever they arrest someone, because of a famous court ruling involving a convict named "Miranda").

Direct Tax funding is limited to the basic infrastructure of having courts at all.

Additional services to the public (other than walking into the courtroom and taking notes with your own pen and paper) are separately billed.

You pay to get food from vending machines in the courthouse (may be outsourced), for getting copies of court records (electronic or on paper) etc. In courts that allow televised or radio reports, they probably charge for use of the power outlets and other facilities provided to the TV stations.

As another example, to download electronic files from pacer.gov, there is a fee for each page, but the first N pages per user are free.

In the US, the court reporters who write official transcripts of what happened are sometimes independent one-(wo)man companies hired by the court to do this job. They are not required to provide the finished transcripts to the court until some later date, but it is legal for them to provide early access to anyone who pays them directly to do so, because this extra income reduces the price the courts have to pay. In fact, I suspect that the sale of early transcripts is now their main business model, and the courts willingly give them a long deadline to increase this business.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

cor: justice > justi$e
Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 10 2012 @ 01:16 AM EDT
When justice costs only the rich can have it.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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