"Small Claims" Consumer Plaintiffs in the Philadelphia Municipal Court: An Empirical Study

Abstract

t Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. A.B. 1952, Yale College; LL.B. 1955, Harvard University. Member, California and District of Columbia Bars. The study which this Article represents was made during the spring and summer of 1972, when the first author had the privilege to be a visiting professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, and the second author a law student there. The study was funded by and made under the auspices of the National Institute for Consumer Justice, a federally sponsored organization located at the University of Michigan Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was one of several studies of small-claims courts in major metropolitan areas made for the Institute. tt A.B. 1969, Columbia University; J.D. 1973, University of Pennsylvania. 1 The claims movement has been traced back to the statutory creation of a debt in London in 1606. Comment, The California Small Claims Court, 52 CALIF. L. REV. 876, 876-77 (1964) [hereinafter cited as Calif. Small Claims Court]; 34 COLUM. L. REV. 932, 933 n.7 (1934). 2 A small claims court may generally be defined as a judicial forum in which claims of a dollar amount may be heard, usually operating with greater speed and informality than the courts of greater jurisdiction. 3 The impetus for the claims movement in this country is widely credited to a seminal article by Roscoe Pound, The Administration of Justice in the Modern City, 26 HARV. L. REV. 302 (1913). The first American claims was established in Cleveland in that year. In the 25 years thereafter, the bulk of the states created by statute some sort of small claims court, although their form and nature varied widely. See Comment, Small Claims Court: Reform Revisited, 5 COLUM. J.L. & Soc. PROB., Aug. 1969, at 47-48 & n.8 [hereinafter cited as Small Claims Court Reform]. An extensive bibliography of pre-1940 materials on claims courts is contained in Northrup, Small Claims Courts and Conciliation Tribunals, 33 L. LiB. J. 39 (1940). See also INSTITUTE OF JUDICIAL ADMINISTRATION, SMALL CLAIMS COURTS IN THE UNITED STATES (1955) and SUPPLEMENT (1959).