ECF is the floor™

Electronic case filing — filing your court papers online — is standard for the lawyer and often denied to the pro se citizen, who’s sent back to paper and postage. The curator’s argument: e-filing should be a floor — a basic given for everyone who walks into a court, not a perk of the guild. And the usual defense makes his case for him: the courts are overworked, so they limit access. Fine — but the limit lands on the citizen, never on the well-resourced firm — a Warner Norcross & Judd — that files all day with a click. The overworked court is relieved on the back of the person with the least, while the repeat player with a floor of its own lawyers is untouched — the captured channel favoring its own insiders. 0g / labeled opinion: he calls the two-tier system constitutionally inconsistent (unequal access to the courts); that is his framing, not settled law — many courts do restrict pro se e-filing, and the steelman is real (training and gatekeeping concerns exist). The house holds it as the argument it is: the door should open the same way for everyone, or it isn’t really open. Ties: the Counsel Paradox, A Phone Is a Witness. (His coin — opinion, labeled. Warner Norcross & Judd is named at the curator’s call as a real, large, well-resourced firm — the archetype of the insider the argument describes; this is a punch-up structural critique of access to justice, not an accusation of any wrongdoing by the firm, and it references no case.)