Look at all of the options available.
-“In the past, some courts have suspended civil cases, some have conducted business as usual,” Sellers said. “It’s really a judge-by-judge, court-by-court determination.”
-“I think American companies can handle it for a while, but obviously if this is still going on six months from now it’ll be a very serious situation,” Wheeler said. If the shutdown is protracted, he said, companies may try to resolve disputes in other ways, including arbitration, if possible, taking their cases to the much larger network of state courts, which isn’t affected by the closure.
And a solution is already in pkace.
-Whenever the cash runs out, the courts will begin operating under the Antideficiency Act, the federal law that requires work to continue if it’s necessary “to support the exercise of Article III judicial powers,” or the resolution of cases, under the Constitution.
And finally, we see who the real culprits are once again (people who are blocking judges have slowed things down.
-A loss of funding for civil cases would exacerbate a problem that’s already made it harder for companies to get their day in court, said Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former deputy director at the Federal Judicial Center in Washington. That problem: 119 judicial vacancies, or about 18 percent of the 677 federal judgeships.
