Unrepresented Litigants in South Australia: A Successful Pre-trial Framework?

Abstract

This paper looks into the problems posed by unrepresented litigants of South Australia, and proposes a pre-trial framework to deal with cases involving at least one unrepresented party. Unrepresented litigants typically impede the efficiency of courts to operate. This paper will argue that the South Australian courts are able to effectively navigate through these problems by setting up a supervised framework to deal with unrepresented litigants, to: (a) ensure early identification of cases involving unrepresented litigants that may affect the efficiency of court proceedings, and (b) allow the courts to conduct review hearings of these cases in stages. This two-pronged approach will hopefully alleviate the problems of backlogs and inefficiency. As will be argued, this can be achieved without sacrificing the important principle of judicial impartiality. The methodology deployed in this research is mainly comparative analysis of other similar common law adversarial jurisdictions, such as Queensland, Alberta, and Hong Kong, with some case studies involving empirical-analytical data.