The Court Clog Disadvantage
VOCABULARY. A list is at the bottom.
1. How a Disadvantage Works
Four parts.
Uniqueness — the bad thing isn’t happening now. This position has the freshest uniqueness claim in the entire Michigan file, and it’s the reason to read it.
Link — the plan causes it. Here: a national restructuring of health financing generates a wave of litigation.
Internal link — courts have finite capacity, and exceeding it degrades their function.
Impact — three modules: democracy, water wars, and judicial independence.
The concept to hold onto: this is a capacity argument, not a merits argument. The negative isn’t claiming the plan loses in court. It’s claiming the volume of cases — regardless of outcome — consumes judicial resources the system doesn’t have.
2. The Big Picture: Docket Congestion and the AI Twist
Court clog is docket congestion — more filings than judicial capacity to resolve them. It’s a chronic feature of the federal system: caseloads per judgeship have grown for decades, judicial vacancies persist, and civil cases in particular can wait years for resolution.
Why it matters, on the standard account: delayed adjudication is degraded adjudication. Overburdened judges spend less time per case, rely more heavily on clerks and summary disposition, and push parties toward settlement regardless of merit. And because the judiciary’s constitutional function is to check the other branches, a judiciary too congested to hear cases promptly is a weakened check.
Now the part that makes this file interesting, and the reason to consider reading this position over the other two.
