Michael Blasie of Seattle has written Information Poverty and the Right to Understand. Here is the abstract:
Legal systems around the world, and particularly in the United States, rest on a foundational delusion: that ordinary people can understand the laws and legal documents that govern them. Despite the growing focus on “access to justice,” most reforms overlook a deeper, more insidious barrier-information poverty. This Article confronts a systemic and largely unexamined truth: even when legal information is technically accessible, it remains functionally incomprehensible to the very people it governs. Drawing on insights from law, public policy, and comparative legal systems, this Article argues that the justice system’s tolerance of incomprehensible legal texts is not just inefficient, it is corrosive. The harms of legal opacity are neither abstract nor evenly distributed. They undermine individual agency, perpetuate structural inequality, and erode the legitimacy of democratic governance. The Article introduces the concept of “conspicuous hypocrisy”-the legal system’s simultaneous demand for clarity and tolerance of confusion-and explores its impact across doctrinal, institutional, and ethical domains. It makes the normative case for a judicially recognized right to understand the law, and proposes concrete institutional reforms, including ethical duties for lawyers and systemic changes within state court systems. This is not a call for better pamphlets or simplified FAQs. It is a call to reckon with the justice system’s most foundational failure: the gap between law as written and law as understood.
