The Hidden Tax on Justice
Want to petition the Supreme Court of the United States?
That'll be $2,000, please.
Not an official filing fee - that's only $300. I'm talking
about the printing costs for the Supreme Court's mandatory 40-booklet
requirement. Under Supreme Court Rule 33, you must submit 40 professionally
printed and bound copies in a specific 6⅛ x 9¼ inch format. No, you can't just
print them yourself. No, standard 8½ x 11 paper won't do. No, PDFs aren't
acceptable even though every other federal court in America has joined the 21st
century.
Professional printing services charge $1,500-3,000 for this
"service." For many Americans with legitimate constitutional claims,
this cost alone makes Supreme Court access impossible.
But here's where it gets truly insidious.
The "Poor Person Exception" That Isn't
The Supreme Court offers an alternative under Rule 39:
proceed in forma pauperis (IFP). If you qualify as indigent, you can
submit just one copy in standard format and skip the printing costs.
Sounds reasonable, right? An accommodation for those who
can't afford the booklet requirement?
Here's the catch: To qualify for IFP, you must file a
detailed financial affidavit - assets, income, debts, expenses - that becomes a
permanent public court record.
Think about that. To avoid the $2,000 printing fee, you
must:
- Disclose
your bank account balances (public record)
- List
all assets including home value and retirement accounts (public record)
- Reveal
your income and employment details (public record)
- Expose
your debts and financial vulnerabilities (public record)
- Hand
all this information to your opposing party
- Make
it searchable on PACER forever
I heard of a regular person who filed a cert petition, a single mom.
She qualified for IFP - she was legally entitled to the fee waiver. But she
paid $2,000+ instead because she refused to make her financial information a
public record accessible to anyone with internet access.
That's not an accommodation. That's extortion.
The Rigged Odds Get Worse
Even if you can afford the $2,000 or are willing to endure the IFP humiliation, your chances of the Supreme Court actually hearing your case are roughly 1-2%. SCOTUS receives 7,000-8,000 cert petitions annually and grants fewer than 100. But those odds aren't equally distributed. Studies show the Court grants cert at significantly higher rates for "repeat players" - the Solicitor General's office, major law firms that regularly practice before SCOTUS, and institutional litigants. If you're an ordinary person with a one-time constitutional claim and a small-firm attorney who's never argued at SCOTUS? Your actual odds are below 1%. So the system works like this: Pay $2,000 (or expose your finances), then face a less-than-1% chance of being heard - unless you're wealthy enough to hire Supreme Court specialists, in which case your odds improve dramatically. The gatekeeping isn't just about the filing fee. It's about every stage of the process being designed to favor those with institutional resources.
The Forced Choice: Pay Up or Relinquish Your Privacy
The system creates a deliberate trap:
Option A: Pay $2,000 you may not have, but preserve
your financial privacy and maintain a "professional" appearance.
Option B: File IFP and expose your complete financial
situation to the world - opposing counsel, future employers, journalists,
anyone who Googles your name.
This isn't about verifying indigency. The Supreme Court
could review sealed financial statements through the clerk's office to confirm
eligibility. The public disclosure requirement serves one purpose:
deterrence through humiliation.
Who This System Really Serves
Let's be clear about who benefits from this structure:
Rich individuals and corporations: Pay the $2,000
without a second thought. Financial privacy fully protected. Taken seriously.
Institutional litigants (ACLU, major law firms,
government entities): Pay as a routine business expense. No financial
disclosure required.
Who gets systematically excluded:
Middle-class Americans with legitimate constitutional
claims:
- Can't
easily spare $2,000
- Have
enough assets that financial disclosure feels invasive and dangerous
- Own a
home? Your equity is now public information.
- Have a
401k? Opposing counsel knows exactly what you're worth.
- Medical
debt? That's public too.
- Your
financial vulnerability becomes ammunition against you.
These middle-class plaintiffs - people with legitimate civil
rights claims, challenge government overreach, fight corporate retaliation, or
contest platform censorship - face an impossible choice. Most simply give up.
That's the intended outcome.
The 40-booklet requirement is a filtering mechanism. It
tells ordinary people: if you can't afford $2,000 in printing costs, the
Supreme Court isn't for you.
The IFP “exception” doesn't help because it requires public
financial humiliation - exposing your complete financial situation to your
opponent and the world. Most people can't afford the $2,000 and won't accept
the humiliation, so they simply don't file.
That's the intended outcome.
The system serves wealthy individuals and institutional
litigants who can pay the fee without thinking about it. Everyone else is
priced out or shamed out. It's that simple.
"Public Servants" Demanding Royal Treatment
Here's what makes this particularly galling: Supreme Court
justices are supposed to be public servants. They:
- Earn
$298,500 per year from taxpayers
- Serve
lifetime appointments with zero accountability
- Control
access to constitutional rights
- Literally
sit beneath the words "Equal Justice Under Law"
Yet they've created a system that:
- Costs
$2,000 to access
- Or
requires public financial humiliation
- Preferentially
serves wealthy institutional litigants
- Systematically
excludes ordinary people with legitimate claims
They're not public servants. They're gatekeepers protecting
an elite system from ordinary Americans.
The Psychological Operation
This is a psyop - a psychological operation designed to
teach people their place. Here's how it works:
Step 1: Create an expensive barrier ($2,000 booklets)
Step 2: Offer an "exception" requiring
humiliating financial disclosure
Step 3: Most people either:
- Pay
and resent it (if they can afford it)
- File
IFP and feel humiliated
- Don't
file at all (most common response)
Step 4: People internalize the message: "The
Supreme Court isn't for people like me."
Result: Ordinary Americans stop believing the legal
system is accessible to them. They accept that courts serve the wealthy and
powerful. They stop fighting back.
It's not really about the $2,000. It's about teaching
people their place in the hierarchy.
The Technology Excuse Is Nonsense
The "justification" for the booklet requirement?
- "Tradition"
(we've always done it this way)
- "Easier
for justices to read" (smaller format is more portable)
- "Professional
appearance"
This is complete nonsense. Federal appellate judges read
PDFs on screens every day. The Fifth Circuit, Fourth Circuit, every other
federal court functions perfectly well with electronic filings and standard
paper sizes. District courts manage millions of filings in 8½ x 11 format.
The Supreme Court could:
- Accept
PDFs (like every other court)
- Accept
standard 8½ x 11 format (like every other court)
- Require
5 copies instead of 40
- Review
sealed financial statements to verify IFP without public disclosure
- Join
the 21st century
They don't because the barriers serve a purpose:
limiting access to those with institutional resources and teaching ordinary
people that the Supreme Court isn't for them.
And Where Are All the Environmentalists?
Let's talk about the environmental cost that nobody mentions. SCOTUS receives 7,000-8,000 cert petitions annually. Each requires 40 professionally printed and bound booklets. That's roughly 280,000-320,000 booklets printed every single year.
The Court denies 99% of these petitions. Which means approximately 280,000 booklets per year are printed solely to be rejected.
What happens to them? Nobody knows. The Supreme Court doesn't publish information about recycling programs or disposal protocols. There's no transparency about whether these quarter-million booklets go to landfills, get incinerated, or sit in storage somewhere.
And the professional binding requirement makes standard recycling difficult or impossible. These aren't just paper documents that can be tossed in a recycling bin—they're saddle-stitched or perfect-bound booklets on heavy stock paper.
Where are the environmental groups on this? The same activists who lecture Americans about plastic straws stay silent about a quarter-million professionally printed booklets being produced annually for a process with a 99% rejection rate.
But criticizing Supreme Court procedure isn't on the donor-approved agenda. So the waste continues, year after year, with zero accountability and zero transparency about what happens to all that paper.
The Court could accept PDFs tomorrow. Every other federal court does. But that would eliminate one more barrier to access—and we can't have that.
When Procedure Matters More Than Innocence
The Supreme Court's priorities become crystal clear when you look at cases like Shinn v. Ramirez, 142 S. Ct. 1718 (2022). Barry Jones was on Arizona's death row. A federal court found that "there is a reasonable probability that his jury would not have convicted him of any of the crimes" if his lawyers had done their job - meaning he was likely innocent. Arizona's lawyers literally argued during oral argument that "innocence isn't enough" to overturn his conviction. The Supreme Court agreed. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6-3 majority, held that procedural rules bar federal courts from considering newly discovered evidence of innocence if it wasn't presented earlier due to ineffective counsel. Justice Sotomayor's dissent called the decision "perverse" and "illogical." The message: Following procedure is more important than not executing innocent people. Similarly, in Herrera v. Collins, 506 U.S. 390 (1993), the Court held that a claim of actual innocence doesn't entitle someone to federal relief if proper procedures weren't followed. This is who sits at the top of our judicial system: people who value procedural compliance over human lives. People who will let an innocent person die rather than acknowledge that the system failed. People who demand $2,000 in printing fees while ruling that innocence isn't enough.
A System That Deserves No Respect
This is just one more piece of evidence that our legal
system is fundamentally broken and corrupt. It's designed to serve power, not
justice. It protects institutions, not individuals. It welcomes the wealthy and
humiliates everyone else.
When the highest court in the land - the supposed final
guardian of constitutional rights - creates a $2,000+ barrier to access with a
humiliation-based "exception," what conclusion should we draw?
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as
designed.
It's designed to keep ordinary people out. It's designed to
make middle-class Americans with legitimate grievances give up before they
start. It's designed to ensure that constitutional rights are privileges
available primarily to those with money and institutional backing.
And it's working. People see the barriers, internalize them,
and stop believing justice is accessible. They accept that courts are for the
elite. They stop fighting.
The Rot Starts at the Top
Here's what you need to understand: The Supreme Court is the best our judicial system has to offer. These are lifetime appointees, supposedly the wisest legal minds in the country, with unlimited resources and no political accountability. And this is what they've built: - A $2,000 barrier to access - A "poor person exception" that requires public financial humiliation - A <1% chance of being heard (lower if you're not a repeat player) - A willingness to execute people they know might be innocent because "procedure was followed" If this is the top of the judicial system - the final arbiter, the court of last resort, the place where justice is supposedly guaranteed - what does that tell you about every court beneath them? District courts, circuit courts, state courts - they all follow the Supreme Court's lead. They all adopt the same elitist barriers, the same procedural worship, (unless the Judge violates procedure just to attack you like Judge Starr has done to us -- that's fine too - because the judges are on a higher plane) the same indifference to actual justice versus legal process.
The rot starts at the top and flows downward. When the Supreme Court says "$2,000 to access justice," lower courts charge hundreds in filing fees and require expensive local counsel. When the Supreme Court says "procedure matters more than innocence," district judges dismiss cases on technicalities while ignoring merit. When the Supreme Court serves institutional interests over individuals, every court below them does the same. You cannot have a just system when the pinnacle of that system is fundamentally corrupt. The $2,000 booklet requirement isn't an aberration - it's a perfect symbol of what the entire judicial system has become. A playground for the wealthy and powerful, with "equal justice under law" as nothing more than empty words carved in marble. This entire system - from the Supreme Court down to the lowest traffic court - is designed to serve power and exclude ordinary people.
The Bottom Line
The 40-booklet requirement isn't about readability or tradition. The IFP public disclosure requirement isn't about verifying need.
These are gatekeeping mechanisms designed to filter out ordinary people while maintaining a thin veneer of accessibility. It's a system that forces you to choose between financial burden and public humiliation - and most people choose neither. They just give up.
That's the point.
But even if you pay the $2,000 - even if you somehow clear that barrier - you're buying a lottery ticket with worse odds than a casino. The Supreme Court grants cert in roughly 1-2% of cases. Your odds plummet further if you're not a "repeat player" - the Solicitor General's office, elite BigLaw firms, institutional litigants who argue before SCOTUS regularly. Studies show these insiders get cert granted at significantly higher rates than ordinary people with regular attorneys.
So you pay $2,000 (or expose your finances), invest months in a petition formatted to arcane specifications that serve no purpose, face worse odds than roulette, and even if you somehow win? The Court might rule that procedure matters more than truth. That constitutional violations can be ignored because deadlines were missed. That innocence isn't enough if proper forms weren't filed on time.
Except "procedure" is just another weapon. When judges want to rule against you, they'll claim you violated procedure - even if they themselves have to fabricate the procedure mid-litigation to do it. When judges want to rule for powerful interests, suddenly procedure becomes flexible, deadlines get extended, and rules get waived. The procedure isn't the principle - it's the excuse. It gets enforced when convenient and ignored when inconvenient, depending entirely on who you are and who you're up against.
The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed: Price out ordinary Americans. Favor institutional players. Weaponize "procedure" against those who manage to get through. Maintain the illusion of access while ensuring almost no one succeeds.
The Supreme Court could change their arcane, burdensome booklet requirement tomorrow. They won't. Because a system that costs $2,300+ to enter, grants access to less than 1% of petitioners (and far less for non-insiders), selectively enforces procedure as a weapon against the powerless while excusing it for the powerful, and serves institutional interests over individuals is working exactly as intended.
This isn't justice. It's oligarchy in robes.
And it deserves not one ounce of respect.
The system won't change until people recognize it for
what it is: a deliberately exclusionary structure designed to protect power and
wealth while keeping ordinary citizens in their place. The $2,000 booklet
requirement is just one symptom of a much larger disease.
