Small claims may be settled without a courtroom

A justice ministry draft would move civil claims below a value threshold entirely into a document-handling system. The claim, the evidence and the decision would exist as structured data from beginning to end. There would be no hearing, no listing, and no courtroom; the file would reach a judge only by exception.

The document opens with numbers, as such documents do. Under the model, the median time from filing to decision would be forty-one minutes against the current several months, and the backlog in this category would fall to a fraction of its present size within two years. The impact annex sees the world entirely from the perspective of the queue, and from that perspective it is difficult to argue with.

The appeal provisions show what the draft is actually for. A decision could be contested on one ground only: that the party requests human determination. Not an error of law. Not new evidence. A person. The request would carry a fee, and the annex puts the expected waiting time for human determination at fourteen weeks.

“The right to a human decision would not be removed,” a spokesperson for the ministry would say. “It would be scheduled.”

The economics follow immediately. The fee is not high, but the fee is not the price; the fourteen weeks are the price. Small claims are typically brought by people for whom the small amount is not small, and who are least able to wait. The system would therefore work best for those who never invoke the exception, and the exception would be preserved, in practice, for those with time to spend on it.

What the model would genuinely improve is consistency, and the draft is right to claim it: the same dispute can currently produce two outcomes in two buildings. Consistency, though, means the same reasoning applied to every case, including the case where the reasoning was wrong. The errors of the present system are individual errors. The errors of a document-handling system are manufactured in series.

The draft is not a bill and the ministry would stress that it is not on the way to becoming one. Its components are neither new nor experimental: online, hearing-free processing of small claims is already ordinary practice in several countries. The only difference so far is that at the end of it, somebody still signs.