Students Testify Before Legislature

Four members of Harvard's Small Claims Advisory Service (SCAS) joined State Senator Cheryl A. Jacques in a Massachusetts Senate-House committee meeting Thursday to testify in favor of reforms to the state's small claims courts.

SCAS, a Phillips Brooks House Association member with offices in both Phillips Brooks House and downtown Boston, advises about 1,500 people each year in settling their small claims cases. Occasionally it also sponsors legislation, as it did last week.

The two bills introduced to the Mass. Legislature call for stronger measures for collecting judgments after settlement, an increase in the dollar limit for small claims cases and limits on how many cases a corporation may file in a year.

"The current small claims collections system is time-consuming, costly and powerless up to a point," SCAS Executive Director Michael A. Blaustein `02 told the Mass. Joint Senate-House Committee on the Judiciary.

Blaustein said the new bills would smooth the small claims system by giving more power to private citizens to make their claims heard.

Some companies, particularly utility companies, file hundreds of cases each year that typically involve customer bills for less than $100. Blaustein said these cases often clog the system.

"We don't mind if corporations use the small claims system," he said. But he said they currently overuse it.

"If a judgment's important enough, they can take it to civil courts," he said.

Blaustein said he felt SCAS had "strong support" for the two bills from their co-sponsor, Sen. Jacques.

But he said many of the bills' opponents in the Legislature are concerned about the bills' strengthened measures for collecting judgments from deadbeat defendants.

Specifically, he said Senate minority Republicans objected to a provision not to renew a liable defendant's driver's license if he fails to pay his claim.

This would mean that a defendant could be imprisoned for driving without a license-effectively "raising a small claims judgment to a criminal level," Blaustein said.

Blaustein added, however, that he felt SCAS had satisfied this objection by using the driver's license punishment only for people the court deemed able to pay.

The current bills would also raise Massachusetts' small claims dollar limit from $2,000-its current level-to $2,500. In 1981 SCAS fought successfully to raise that limit from $750 to $1,250.

Blaustein said he felt the importance of streamlining the state's small claims system, which handles some 100,000 cases per year, is anything but small-even though the cases themselves are not large.

"It's probably the place where the most people form their opinions about the judicial system," he said.