• Shruti BaxFollow

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Court reporters have long been a fixture of American jurisprudence, but tightening state budgets and a nationwide shortage of certified reporters have left many state court civil proceedings without any form of verbatim transcription at public expense. While litigants with means can hire private court reporters to accompany them to their proceedings, indigent parties must go without—even though the absence of a transcript is often deadly to one’s chances of prevailing on appeal, no matter how meritorious the claim.

In the 1956 case Griffin v. Illinois, the Supreme Court held that the principle of equal justice demands that “[d]estitute defendants must be afforded as adequate appellate review as defendants who have money enough to buy transcripts.” This Comment draws on Griffin and its progeny to argue that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses establish a right to verbatim transcript creation at state expense for some indigent civil litigants. Although a court reporter’s transcript is not formally required to appeal, the nonverbatim reconstructed records provided for by states’ rules of procedure are seriously flawed and may often fail to enable constitutionally adequate appellate review.

Bax, Shruti (2026) "Establishing a Right to Civil Transcription," University of Chicago Law Review: Vol. 93: Iss. 5, Article 3.
Available at: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclrev/vol93/iss5/3

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