Demystifying the Civil Summons: Removing Barriers to Justice in Tennessee General Sessions Court Forms

Abstract

For decades, lawyers and judges in the Tennessee “general sessions” lower civil court have expressed concern that the dense, centuries-old legal language used in the court summons forms for evictions and civil cases might be incomprehensible and/or misleading to litigants, most of whom are not represented by a lawyer who would be able to assist them in interpreting and navigating the lawsuit process. Many of those who are sued in the general sessions lose their case by default simply because they do not show up for their court date, and stakeholders in the judicial system suspect that litigant difficulties in interpreting the summons forms may be partially to blame. Summons forms that prove to be unreadable to the extent that they fail to inform litigants of claims being made against them would effectively be a barrier to the proper administration of justice in the state. This thesis develops a two-pronged assessment of whether the language and visual design used in the current general sessions summons forms (“warrants”) is likely to be understandable to most Tennesseans – especially to vulnerable populations whose socioeconomic conditions make obtaining legal representation unlikely. First, the thesis aimed to determine the extent to which the forms abide by the Pew Civil Legal System Modernization Project’s principles of user-friendly civil court summons design, by examining how well the warrants function for their various audiences of litigants, lawyers, judges, clerks, and process servers. The results gleaned from this assessment as well as input from a wide range of court stakeholders all indicate that the warrants are difficult for many litigants to understand and may violate constitutional standards of due process. In light of this, the second part of the assessment proposes a full redesign of the summons forms, which seeks to retain the essential content of the current warrants while incorporating principles of accessible language and visual design. The redesign is intended to prevent more Tennesseans from suffering the potentially devastating consequences of misinterpreting a civil court summons. I then review responses to a questionnaire that I administered to general sessions litigants in Davidson County about their experiences of interacting both with the warrants and with my redesigned summons forms. I conclude with three recommendations for policy solutions that could provide a path to implementing my redesigned forms at both the state and county levels.