I've actually been thinking about this for a while. On one hand, it is effectively a ddos of the system, as others have said.
On the other hand, it feels like the legal system as a whole has been for the exclusive use and benefit of those with money and power for a long time. If this levels the playing field for the common dipshit, even just a little and at great cost to the system as a whole, its hard for me to be that upset.
I don't know. We all get what we fucking deserve I guess.
Greer's case (and his conduct therein) is an edge case of edge cases, and it's highlighting how badly a number of different graces the court extends towards the common person intersect in the wrong hands.
-IFP is great for the truly impoverished seeking recourse for (presumably) their wrongs. A weaselly bastard like Russ has abused it to allow him to file cases at a moment's notice whenever the whim strikes him, leading to a frivolous attitude towards petitioning the court (look at how Russ completely dropped the oh-so-important, worthy-of-an-emergency-ruling case against the state of Nevada to let him put his whore initiative on the 2026 ballot, that he completely dropped when things got real for him during the eviction saga and has not really revisited)
-Pro-se representation is great in that it doesn't gatekeep access to legal justice to the hands of a privileged few, but gives the common man an avenue towards it, with
some grace extended towards their conduct for not being a legal professional. However, it allows local nutcases to make a mockery of the court and waste everyone's time extending grace towards obviously baseless cases.
-AI is helpful in letting pro-se litigants more easily parse the often byzantine world of the legal profession, which minimizes (to an extent) the amount of hand-holding a judge has to give to said litigants as well as the sense of unfairness on the part of the defense. However, it's also by design trainable and eager to please whoever is training it, so nutcase pro-se litigants will easily force it into bad legal theory and hallucinating case law when it's trying to square their (obviously illegal) goals with the legal code it has access to.
Really, the lesson from this, and Greer's other cases, is that the problem isn't AI. It isn't IFP. It isn't Pro-se litigants. Not entirely. It's that the courts are too scared of labeling a frequent IFP/pro-se/AI-spamming litigant as vexatious.
The means to handle litigants like Greer is readily available to the court. I can't think of any rules we could add to judicial conduct that would have any impact when the judges on this case refuse to do their fucking jobs, dismiss this case for any of the
many reasons Hardin has proffered up, including the fact that the Supreme Court just weighed in and said "yeah providing the infrastructure access to
other sites that illegally host copyrighted material isn't contributory infringement"
while specifically calling out the decision that this current case is based on as incorrect, and label Greer a vexatious litigant who has to do extra work going forward proving he's got a real case before he's allowed to file anymore lawsuits.
Russ should've been marked as vexatious in the first few lawsuits he filed after literally publishing a book describing how he sued a celebrity as a publicity stunt. Probably sometime around when he sued the production company as a spurned contestant. If he had to do the tiniest amount of work to file lawsuits going forward instead of spamming the local government whenever his druthers were up, the judges wouldn't be in this situation.
The only real change I can suggest is that it's bullshit IFP petitions are automatically filed under seal, that should be readily available to the defense because of people like greer, and the poors can just deal with the scrutiny tbh.
