Civil Procedure
May 29, 2026
A court's own remedy for the civil backlog: the early 'enabling hearing'
California's severely under-resourced and overburdened court system should adopt an early case-screening "enabling hearing" to quickly identify and divert legally defective lawsuits, thereby reducing delay and preserving limited judicial resources for meritorious cases.
Robert J. Shulkin
Robert J. Shulkin has litigated civil cases throughout Southern California for more than 45 years, handling thousands of matters. A 1980 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he has tried cases across the region and litigated in state and federal court. He has contributed to the real estate section of Continuing Education of the Bar (CEB) and has lectured throughout the state on real estate brokerage law.
Civic-minded Californians expect that when legal disputes arise, the courts will resolve them, giving anyone with a genuine grievance a day in court and a measure of justice. After two decades of budget cuts and swelling dockets, that expectation has quietly become fiction, and every litigant in a California superior court learns, sooner or later, the true meaning of the old maxim: justice delayed is justice denied. The plaintiff with a meritorious claim waits years fo...
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