Access To Justice: God Bless The Oklahoma Supreme Court

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has held that the requirement of an affidavit of merit in a professional negligence action is an unconstitutional infringement on access to the courts:

The Oklahoma Constitution does not anticipate that litigants will be  burdened with the entire bill for maintenance of the court system. The Oklahoma courts were never intended to be  self-funded, and the increasing degree to which they have become so is  disturbing. Despite our holding in Fent v. State ex. rel. Dep't of Human Services, 2010 OK 2, 236 P.3d 61, the judicial department of government is  burdened with collecting fees for thirty seven entities--only seven of which  have a relationship to the third branch of government. The Okla. Const. art. 2,  §6, guarantees the right of individuals to access the courts, and while  litigation does not have to be free and entirely at the public expense, at the  very least the provision means that justice cannot be for sale. The idea that  money cannot be used as a bar to deny justice long predates the Oklahoma  Constitution, and is one of the fundamental values of our legal system.

The Magna Carta, one of the oldest progenitors of American  legal principles, states: "We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to  any man, either justice or right." When the cost of obtaining an affidavit of merit in  professional negligence actions is added to the already high and increasingly  rising cost of using the court system to resolve disputes, the result is that a  line is crossed, and litigation costs go from being merely a hurdle to being an  unconstitutional burden on accessing the courts.

The title expresses my views. (Mike Frisch)