Litigation Literacy in the Lawyerless Court: Evidence from a Community-Based Eviction Defense Curriculum

Federal law has protected a party's choice to conduct a case personally since the Judiciary Act of 1789, while modern civil procedure largely assumes professional representation. This article coins litigation literacy as the term for the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required to recognize a justiciable problem, invoke or respond to formal legal process, and participate competently in the adversarial resolution of that problem, with or without professional assistance. The Winner Litigation Literacy Framework turns that definition into an operational model of situation-bound procedural agency. It asks whether a person facing an active case can recognize a procedural event, identify the rule, deadline, and consequence it activates, select and complete a valid next act, communicate or prove what matters, and preserve claims and review options. Its unit is the event-response pair, and its standard is observable performance within a specified forum and case stage. Functional, interactive, and critical levels organize that performance. Searchable information and guided forms support discrete tasks. The framework measures whether a learner can act across an unfolding case. A Chicago eviction defense curriculum illustrates the measurement problem. Among 36 participants with paired intake and exam records, mean scores rose 16.9 percentage points (paired t-test, p < .001). The paired data establish immediate knowledge gains within that sample. Separate platform records show broader, topic-selective use, with approximately 47 percent of signups watching at least one instructional video. The article proposes a short scenario-based instrument and places litigation literacy alongside representation and court simplification as an access-to-justice strategy.