Canadian Lawyer

LEGAL REPORT/Litigation The 'scourge' of unrepresented litigants A ruling from Alberta takes a swipe at certain vexatious parties but the reality is most self-represented litigants do it because they can't afford legal help. J ulie Macfarlane says the centuries-old legal cliché about people who represent themselves in court having fools for clients makes perfect sense. But the reality is record numbers of Canadians with legal cases — the vast majority when family law is involved — no longer turn to lawyers to represent them in civil matters. "I am blown away by the numbers of self-represented litigants in our courts today," says Macfarlane, a University of Windsor law professor who is currently conducting a national research project on the subject. "I think it's more fitting now to say that it's the inmates who are running the asylum." That's why she, like many lawyers who are aware of and interested in the self-rep phenomenon, welcomed the public spotlight a recent Alberta ruling shone on the more lunatic fringe of a fast-growing category of litigants in the 44 Jan uary 2013 www.CANADIAN Canadian court system. In the 155-page decision he rendered last September in a matrimonial dispute, Court of Queen's Bench Associate Chief Justice John D. Rooke issued a call to arms against self-represented litigants he dubs "Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Argument" litigants — or OPCAs. "This Court has developed a new awareness and understanding of a category of vexatious litigant," Rooke writes near the outset of Meads v. Meads, which notably begins with three famous quotations from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan about the fundamental roles of liberty and law in society. Despite their lack of homogeneity, the judge lumps OPCAs "by their own admission or by descriptions given by others" into six main groups: • De-taxers, who focus on avoiding tax liability; • Freemen or Freemen-on-the-Land, who espouse anti-government rhetoric L a w ye r m a g . c o m using commercial contract-sounding words and phrases; • Sovereign Men or Sovereign Citizens, who focus on state oppression and physical violence; • Church of the Ecumenical Redemption International (or CERI), a "pot church" based in Edmonton; • Moorish Law, which involve mostly black Muslim men who claim to be governed by religious beliefs that trump the authority of the courts; and • "Other labels," namely litigants who do not identify with any group but use similar filibustering tactics and "magic hat" arguments that absolve them from legal obligations. The judge also found, while OPCA litigants are often conspiracy theorists, they usually have no specified targets. "When reduced to their conceptual core," writes Rooke, "most OPCA concepts are contemptibly stupid." He expressed hope the term OPCA Peter Mitchell by Mark Cardwell

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