Podcast with Justin Weinstein-Tull: Traffic Courts

This podcast episode accompanies the article from Professor Weinstein-Tull: Traffic Courts.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Professor Weinstein-Tull, Peter Mason

Peter Mason  00:00

Traffic courts resolve over half of the cases in the US legal system. These cases are easy for some defendants to handle by paying a fine, but they can have devastating effects for those with fewer means. And despite the key role these courts play in funding state judicial branches and other state and local programs, they have not been comprehensively studied in decades. What's going on in traffic courts, and what can they teach us about the legal system more broadly?

My name is Peter Mason, and you are listening to the California Law Review podcast. Our goal is to provide an accessible and thought-provoking overview of the scholarship we publish. In today's episode, we will be discussing "Traffic Courts," a piece by Justin Weinstein-Tull, Professor of Law at Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. This piece was published in Issue 4 of Volume 112 in August 2024. Professor Weinstein-Tull, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today about your article.

Professor Weinstein-Tull  00:58

Thank you, Peter. I am so thrilled that the California Law Review is publishing the piece, and I'm really happy to be talking to you about it.

Peter Mason  01:08

To begin with, can you summarize your main arguments in this piece?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  01:12

Sure. So my overarching argument, really, is that we should pay attention to traffic courts. As law professors--as law students, even--we are mostly paying attention to courts that we sort of consider to be more important--courts like the Supreme Court or state supreme courts or federal appellate courts. But when you kind of get down to it and look closely at these smaller courts, they can teach us about what the law is, how it's decided, how it's actually doled out to individuals. And it looks different from what we think of as what law does and as what courts do.

Peter Mason  02:00

What motivated you to write this article?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  02:03

I've written before about local courts and their place in the state and federal system broadly, but I hadn't written about specific courts. And I just--I wanted to just get as small as I possibly could, just kind of dive into the smallest possible court I could find, see how it operated, see what I could learn from those courts. Really, just sort of get my hands dirty. It's really easy for law professors to kind of exist in a sort of abstracted space. And I think that's dangerous, because then we don't get to see, you know, how the law affects human beings. And so I chose the smallest court that I could find: traffic courts. It turns out that no one had really written about what goes on in these courts for a very long time. And the sort of incredible thing about studying small institutions is that there are so many of them that you end up actually studying something big. Each individual traffic court is small, but as you said, it's--traffic courts make up nearly half of the cases decided by the justice system. So it ended up being that I felt that I was looking at something sort of quite large, and that was why I wanted to really dive into these courts.

Peter Mason  03:27

Great. And so early on, your article sets out what exactly you mean when you talk about traffic courts and traffic cases, given their variance across the US legal system. Could you briefly explain how you use those terms in your article?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  03:40

Sure. So you're right that there's variance across the legal system. We have the federal system, and there's just one federal system, but then every state and the District of Columbia has its own judicial system, and every state does things slightly differently. So I needed a kind of definition so that I could look at each state and say, "Okay, this is what I'm thinking of, and this is what I'm not." And so I think of traffic courts as any court that's hearing traffic cases at the time that they're hearing traffic cases. So some states, for example, will actually have traffic courts. They might actually call them traffic courts, and then that's a traffic court. But some states just have, you know, lower courts, like justice of the peace courts, or municipal courts, or county courts, town courts, and those courts will hear traffic cases. And actually states, themselves, will sort of even--they might actually call it traffic court when those local courts are hearing traffic cases. So that's what I think of as a traffic court: courts that are hearing traffic cases. Traffic cases are cases where a traffic violation is at issue, and traffic violations are generally defined by each state's code, each state's statutes, and often together in one section, and they're generally considered sort of civil infractions. In some states, violations are misdemeanors, but in most they are kind of civil infractions, or civil violations in some way. So things like--it's the violations you would expect, right? It's things like speeding or reckless driving or going through a red light or a stop sign, and it's some things you might not think of also, like, so in some states, if you're at an intersection and you're at a red light, it would be an infraction to pull into a parking lot and try to avoid the red light. I didn't realize that was true, but that's apparently a violation. So that--I would consider that a traffic case, any case that deals with those kinds of traffic violations.

Peter Mason  05:56

The other thing you do early on is set up the stakes of your inquiry. So simply put, what makes traffic courts so important to study?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  06:04

Yeah, they are so important. So the first reason is that most people will go through their entire lives never having a case before the United States Supreme Court, right, or even the state Supreme Court, or a federal appellate court, or even a state general jurisdiction trial court, like a superior court. But most people probably will get a traffic ticket at some point in their lives. I have. And so traffic courts are kind of the way in which many/most people actually interact with the justice system. So that's important on its own, I think.  But there are other reasons. So you know, the most common sanction that a traffic court will issue is a monetary penalty, is a fine of some kind, but those fines can actually be worse than than they seem, because states and courts will tack on court fees, administrative fees, which will then really elevate these, these monetary fines. So in California, for example--actually, they recently changed it a couple years ago, but up until just a couple years ago, $100 base fine, if that was the fine that you were doled out by the judge, would be paired with $390 in court fees, for a total penalty of $490, right? So that's a massive amount of money. And if you aren't able to pay the sanction right away, courts will add additional fees. And these things actually snowball very, very quickly and very easily. And so it's very easy to kind of blink and realize that, you know, a traffic ticket or a handful of traffic tickets have transformed into thousands of dollars in fines. And it has even happened that traffic fines have led to bankruptcy in many cases. So the penalty that these courts kind of dish out are important to human beings, and it's not just fines also. The second most common sanction in traffic court is suspension of driver's licenses. And so if you fail to appear at your hearing, or if you fail to pay the fine, courts in most states have discretion to suspend your driver's license, and a suspended driver's license is just pretty catastrophic for people who rely on their cars to get to work. There was a survey out of New Jersey that found that 42% of people whose license was suspended ended up losing their job, which is just a huge consequence of traffic punishment. So that's why I think these courts are important for human beings.  But I think they also matter to the justice system more broadly. As a matter of caseloads, they just sort of completely dominate the system. As of 2021 there were 63 million cases filed in state courts overall, and of those 29 point 9 million cases were traffic cases, right? So we're talking tens of millions of traffic cases. So they're a huge part of the justice system, and no other kind of case really comes close. They also fund the justice system. So fees and fines collected from traffic tickets will often fund local court systems and other governmental programs in the state. And in a number of states, you know, these fees and fines levied by traffic courts and collected by traffic courts can actually be the largest single funding source for the entire judicial branch of the state. So, traffic courts are important. They're important because we come into contact with them. They're important because the the punishments that they dole out matter to humans. And they're important actually for the entire justice system of each state.

Peter Mason  10:16

Okay, so now we know what you have in mind when you talk about traffic courts, and we know why those courts are important to study. Given the dearth of research on these courts over the past few decades, though, how did you go about actually researching them?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  10:28

So it is hard to research local courts. As I mentioned before, they're different from state to state. They're different from, you know, local government to local government. There's no written opinions, largely. There are so many of them. And so they're very opaque institutions, and that's a major methodological problem for studying these courts, and actually, I think, probably for studying local courts more broadly. And I decided that to really get a perspective on these courts, I needed to kind of attack them from three different perspectives. The first was a kind of national approach. So with the help of some very fantastic and very patient research assistants, I conducted a number of 50-state surveys that looked at kind of broadly throughout the country, how are traffic courts operating? What's their jurisdiction? What's the discretion that traffic judges have? What kind of courts are they heard in?  And then I wanted to take a deep dive into one particular state to get a better feel for what's actually happening in these courts that a 50-state survey can't really get you. So I chose Arizona, which is where I live, and I interviewed traffic judges in Arizona to sort of try to get into the mind of a traffic judge, you know, hear about how they resolve cases, the kinds of things they're thinking about. And I was also actually trained as a traffic judge myself, so I went to a three-day training that Arizona puts on for what we call "civil traffic hearing officers" in Arizona who aren't judges, but since there are so many traffic cases, there are these civil traffic hearing officers hired by the state to hear just traffic cases. And so I went to this three-day training for how to hear traffic cases, and that gave me a pretty great, actually, insight into the way the state thinks about traffic cases and the way that traffic judges are trained.

Peter Mason  11:41

Amazing. And so, due to your diligent work, you got all these fresh, nuanced data on how traffic courts are actually operating. One finding you discuss in depth is the fact that despite their diversity across states and localities, traffic courts tend to be characterized by informality. Can you explain to listeners how you identified that informality as a key feature of traffic courts and what exactly it entails?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  13:07

Yeah, so it's probably not too surprising to anyone that traffic courts are informal courts, or certainly far more informal than you might imagine a normal court where there's a jury and a judge and, you know, two lawyers and all that. But I noticed that traffic courts were both legally informal and also procedurally informal. So they're legally informal because in many cases--and certainly this was the case in Arizona—there are no lawyers in in traffic courts. Defendants, right--so, people who have gotten a traffic ticket--rarely bring defense counsel to traffic court. It does happen, but it's quite rare. The police who come representing the state often won't bring prosecutors, and so there are no lawyers representing the parties. And then it's actually very common that the judge also won't be a lawyer. So in many states--it's the majority of states--those states allow judges to not have law degrees, and we call them, you know, lay judges, because they're non-lawyers. And in those states, it's very often the case that traffic courts will be presided over by someone who's not a lawyer. So now you have a room where there's no lawyers, the parties aren't represented, and the judge is not a lawyer, right? So that changes what the proceedings are going to be like. For example, there is little to no case law that becomes relevant in traffic court, right? There's little, there's very little doctrine. So when I asked judges I interviewed about doctrinal law, you know, some of them would say, "No, you know, I'm not a lawyer. Like, why would I use doctrine," right? And defendants who aren't lawyers generally aren't bringing in cases and saying, "Look at this case," right? And same with police. So there's this legal informality that that exists. And actually, as sort of an aside, there's very little doctrinal traffic law out there, because traffic cases are rarely, rarely appealed. And so there's, there's sort of rarely cases that get put on the record that deal with traffic law. So even, you know, even if you wanted to bring in a traffic law case, there aren't actually that many. I mean, of course, there are some cases that deal with, you know, civil procedure and criminal procedure that might be relevant. But in general, there's, there's very little case law in a lot of these courts. Traffic courts are procedurally informal as well, because in many states there are actually rules of procedure or statutory rules that specifically mandate that traffic courts be informal. So in Arizona, for example, traffic hearings are explicitly informal hearings. According to code, the rules of evidence don't apply. Hearsay is admissible, and there's a simplified procedure for the hearing. That's not true in every state. Some states apply their standard rules of civil procedure or criminal procedure, but it is true in a number of them. So these courts are informal in sort of different ways. They proceed informally, and the content of what happens in these courts is also fairly informal,

Peter Mason  16:34

Yeah, and so that broad informality leads, as you point out, to traffic court judges exercising lots of discretion when they adjudicate. To keep moving through your findings, I was hoping you could dig into what discretion traffic court judges have, generally speaking, and what they tend to do with it. 

Professor Weinstein-Tull  16:49

So you're right. Judges in these courts operate with a ton of discretion. In many states, traffic judges or hearing officers can completely eliminate traffic fines, if they decide to do that. In some states, they can reduce those fines. In many states, they have discretion to order that a defendant must go to traffic school or do community service instead of paying a penalty or in addition to paying a penalty. And the justification required to exercise that discretion is very thin. And so a few states will say, you know, "Judges should exercise discretion when the defendant has financial hardship and can't pay a ticket." And that's guidance of a particular kind, but most states that give judges discretion, allow them to exercise that discretion sort of broadly in the interest of justice or for no reason at all. So there is, and, you know, I'm sort of, I'm generalizing here. You know, the paper contains all the 50-state surveys, and and states are different. There are some states that that require judges to give a specific fine and prohibit them from going over or going under. But in many, many, many states, judges have discretion of some kind, whether it's completely eliminating the fine or reducing it, or substituting it with community service or driving school.  So that sort of raised this question for me, which is, if traffic judges have all this discretion, how are they exercising that discretion? And you can't just go to Westlaw or Lexis, where we would normally find, you know, federal opinions or state Supreme Court opinions and say, like, "Okay, you know, pull up traffic case x. What were the reasons the judge used?" because these opinions aren't written, they're not available in databases. And so that's a hard question, right? I mean, that was sort of the question that I focused on when I was speaking with judges. And I would ask the judges, like, "How would you exercise discretion? What were the factors that you would think about when issuing a fine?" And I got a variety of answers that were all different, but also all similar in the sense that they generally sounded in ideas of fairness, but different forms of fairness. So one judge talked about procedural fairness and said she just wanted to make sure that people in her courtroom felt heard. That was sort of her highest priority. Another judge said that she tried to maintain sort of uniform penalties across defendants, right? So if two panel, if two defendants had basically the same infraction, she felt they should have basically the same fine, right? So it's kind of equality based fairness. Another judge said that he would reduce penalties if there were multiple traffic tickets and the penalty was just too high, right? And it just felt unfair. Another judge said that she would look for mitigating circumstances or aggravating circumstances that would allow her to decrease the fine, right? A kind of situational fairness.  And those are, you know, lay understandings of fairness. Those are just sort of really intuitive understandings of what fairness is. These judges didn't see those philosophies as derived from case law or statutory law. There they were more like kind of personal philosophies. And I think that makes sense in a way, that if you are in an institution where you're increasing discretion and you're increasing informality, you're left with judicial action that's going to inevitably sort of rely on the values of the justice system broadly, right--things like fairness. And if you have judges who don't have law degrees, who aren't grounded in that kind of decision-making, those values of the justice system are going to be, I think, especially broad.

Peter Mason  20:10

Great, and then with the findings of your research set out, the article concludes with a couple broader implications of them. Interestingly, these emanate from the fact that traffic courts defy so many basic presumptions we tend to attribute to US courts. To start then, how does the unique structure of traffic courts lend them to both upsides and downsides that we see elsewhere in the legal system?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  21:22

So in addition to looking at small courts, which are totally fascinating to me, I also study federalism broadly. And federalism is about dividing power between the federal government and the states, and it is about what the benefits of empowering state and local governments are and what drawbacks come with that empowering, as well. And one of the benefits we tend to think about is that when we decentralize power or when we distribute power to states and local governments, those governments can be more representative of the people who they represent. I mean, the federal government is massive and represents hundreds of millions of people, whereas local governments are, you know, quite a bit smaller and can do a better job of representing the people who live in those governments. Or at least that's kind of the idea. It doesn't always work out that way in practice. But I think the traffic courts can vindicate that value of being representative of the communities where they exist. And I'm speaking about kind of traffic courts, you know, at their very best, can vindicate that value, right? Doesn't mean that they always will. But because traffic court adjudication is so open-ended, or there's so much discretion and informality, these judges and these courts can incorporate community norms into their decision making. You know, some traffic judges I spoke with understood their role as deeply embedded within the community and committed to sort of keeping their communities safe and doing what was best for their community. I spoke to one judge who actually talked about a specific road in her community where there were speed traps, and she said that she was sort of sympathetic to people who would get traffic tickets there. That sounds like a small thing, I realize, and it is a small thing, but that's sort of what we talk about when we think about the upsides of these really small, local, embedded institutions. It's, it's community knowledge.  On the other hand, I have this, this real concern after writing this paper that traffic courts are extremely opaque institutions. Their opinions aren't written. Sometimes they're recorded, audio recorded, sometimes not. They're almost never appealed. Very low appeals rates. And there are just so many cases, right, tens of millions, such that we don't have a good sense of how just or unjust those outcomes are, sort of on a global level, right? The, the judges I talked to talk about fairness, and every judge I spoke with made it clear that they wanted to be as fair as possible, right, and that they were sort of doing their best to be as fair as possible. But I do have worries that the sort of informal nature of traffic court will kind of systemically work against those who are least able to navigate the system. And, and historically, places where discretion exists within institutions are also spaces where things like discrimination and like racism can seep in, right? And there is so much discretion in traffic court, and, and given the kind of complete lack of oversight, we need to reassure ourselves that there isn't a tremendous amount of injustice happening. And I think it's actually very difficult to do that. And when we look more broadly at local courts, we can see injustice. There are exposés that come out. There are newspaper reports that document major problems with local court systems. So, you know, if an institution is very opaque, and if the little that we sort of systematically see is troubling, then I do think there is reason for worry and reason to want to kind of increase oversight of these courts.

Peter Mason  25:20

Yeah, and you also argue that your study of traffic courts presents two new categorical distinctions in courts that themselves suggest novel approaches to judicial reform and oversight. What are those categorical distinctions and what do you make of their relevance with respect to traffic courts?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  25:36

So traffic courts, having looked at them, they just look so different from what we're used to seeing. And the normal distinctions we see in court, in, say, federal court or state courts are things like, you know, civil cases versus criminal cases, appeals courts versus trial courts. Well, here we have this set of courts that are doing something fairly different. And so I think they raise different questions for us from other courts. And one question that that I think that these courts raise, is, how do we deal with courts that don't really engage with legal precedent? We sort of assume that courts are going to think about case law, right? We have common law courts that deal with binding case law. Federal district courts are bound by federal appeals courts, and federal appeals courts are bound by the Supreme Court and et cetera, et cetera. But here we have courts where they're not really looking to case law, right? They're looking internal to themselves, to their views of fairness and also maybe to statutes. So I think it makes sense for us to think about how to treat courts that engage with precedent and courts that don't engage with precedent, or what I call precedential and non-precedential courts. And if we're thinking about reforms right, then we should think about how to reform non precedential courts. How do you improve courts where the judges are mostly relying on internal sort of understandings of fairness, rather than external sources of law, like state constitutions or state, state Supreme Court cases?  And one way, I think, is to change the way we train these judges right? So every, every state has something called a an Administrative Office of the Court. They're not always called that exactly, but they have administrative bodies that administer their court systems, and they train judges that are selected. Well, if judges are sort of having to rely on ideas of fairness, broad values of the justice system, then we should train them right to develop that sense of what fairness is. If that's the kind of source of authority that they're drawing from, then let's help them understand a broad range of ways of thinking about fairness.  The other categorical distinction that I think traffic courts raise is the distinction between judicial and administrative courts. So you know, judicial courts, they are subject to appeal. There aren't so many of them that we can't engage in some oversight. But there is some sense in which traffic courts actually resemble administrative agencies, and that is in their, in the quantity of their caseload. In some sense, what traffic judges are doing is similar to what administrative line workers are doing, right? Considering applications for public assistance or, you know, to register to vote. There's a kind of assembly line quality to these traffic judges. And for you know, judicial courts, oversight tends to happen via the appeal system. But for traffic courts, which maybe are sort of playing the role of administrative agency, the volume of these courts--the volume of these cases is just so massive that it's very difficult to oversee solely based on the appeal system. And appeals rates for these courts are very low, 1% or lower. I mean, that sort of depends on the state and the local government, etc, etc, but we're talking very low.  So maybe we need to consider new forms of oversight--oversight that we might normally associate with administrative agencies. So things like auditing, right? We could audit a week's worth of recordings of a traffic court and have a state employee listen to that recording and see, you know what's going on here. Is the court basically operating in a fair and just way? Or we could have state employees sitting in on traffic courts to give them a sense of how the court's operating, right? That might be a more efficient way of providing oversight of these courts than just the appeals route. And I think might also just be kind of a helpful avenue to reassure ourselves that things are okay in these courts, or to see that maybe things aren't okay and decide whether we want kind of more fundamental reform.

Peter Mason  30:13

Finally, what do you hope a listener or reader takes away from this episode more generally?

Professor Weinstein-Tull  30:18

Well, I hope you read the paper. I tried to make it engaging. There are a lot of stories in there about traffic courts and what happens, and it's not outrageously long. If you're a law student, I would encourage you to take classes that allow you to learn about small courts. If you're someone who cares about justice, those are the courts where the bulk of the justice is happening or the injustice is happening. There aren't always classes offered in these courts, but clinics very often litigate in these courts. And so you could take a clinic where you get to understand more about, say, housing court or family court or civil court. If you're a law professor, I would say, look to local courts. I mean, in many ways, it's kind of a wide open field. It's understudied and it's interesting. So, you know, if you're a torts professor, for example, look to see how local courts are handling tort claims. You know, it might not be published, but it might be very different from how state supreme courts are saying that we should think about tort claims. Similarly, contract stuff, right? How are small claims courts interpreting contracts? There are some folks who are doing really, really fascinating work on that, but I think that there's just so much more that we can do to sort of understand the reality of the justice system that takes place in these kind of very opaque and small courts. And if you're someone who's, you know, not a law professor or not a student, and you're just interested in the law, I'd encourage you to just, you know, if you can sort of look beyond the Supreme Court. 99% of news articles about courts are about the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court is so important, and matters so much, and is doing a whole lot of things right now. But it still isn't the court that handles, you know, most of the claims that get filed, and so look beyond the Supreme Court. Look for news articles that talk about small local courts, justice of the peace courts. They're out there and they're really interesting. 

Peter Mason  32:23

Professor Weinstein-Tull, thank you so much for joining us and discussing your article.

Professor Weinstein-Tull  32:27

My pleasure, Peter, thank you so much for having me on and again, my deep thanks go to the California Law Review and all of the editors in the California Law Review for working on the article, doing great work on the article and for publishing it in the first place. Thanks.

Peter Mason  32:51

We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the California Law Review podcast. If you would like to read the article, you can find it in Volume 112, Issue 4 of the California Law Review at californialawreview.org. For updates on new episodes and articles, please follow us on Instagram @californialawreview. A complete list of our socials is available on our website. Lastly, you can find a list of the editors who worked on this episode of the podcast in the show notes. See you next time.