Pro Se Litigant Claims Discrimination Based on National
Origin
Property Rights Foundation of America Asks
U.S. Supreme Court for Fair Hearing for Litigants
Kant’s House Worth $199,000 Was Disposed of for $6,020
Washington, DC, August 31, 2004
Substance, not mere procedure should determine the rights of
property owners. Property Rights Foundation has again taken a
stand in the United States Supreme Court. The Foundation has filed
papers seeking to enter the case of Kant v. Bergman, Berbert,
Schwartz & Gilday LLC, Supreme Court Case No. 04-124 as
a friend of the Court. The foundation has also filed a brief opposing
a disturbing trend in some federal courts of raising the technical
standards of pleading in cases brought by individuals seeking
to protect their rights.
The parties on whose behalf the Foundation is seeking to intervene
are suing the law firm that formerly represented them. The law
firm sued to collect a disputed legal bill of $5,378.52, won and
then, at a Sheriff’s sale, auctioned off the Kant’s
house in Montgomery County, Maryland, at a confiscatory price.
The house was valued at $199,000.00 and it was sold for only $6,020.00.
The Kants tried to redress the matter in court without an attorney
claiming, among other things, discrimination based on their national
origin. They are of East Indian descent. Their case was swiftly
thrown out on technical grounds without a trial. At issue at this
stage is the process which silenced their voice before they had
a chance to be heard.
What the Foundation is seeking to promote in this case is best
described by a reference in its brief to the words of the late
Judge Jerome Frank taken from his acclaimed critique Courts
on Trial (Princeton University Press, 1949). He set as a goal
the establishment of procedures which will provide for “…
the easy, simple, unimpeded operation, in court, of the substantive
rules in such a way as to prevent litigants from losing suits,
which under those rules they should win.”
Brian P. Murphy of Griffin Farmer & Murphy LLP, Washington,
D.C., is representing the Foundation in the friend of the court
brief in support of Chander and Ashima Kant.
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