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Disability, Accessibility, and Civil Rights

Pro Se and the Cognitive Tax: Legalese and the Fundamental Right of Access to Courts

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Legal research article.

Written
July 2026
Version
v8
Pages
65
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Abstract

The right of self-representation runs on two tracks. In criminal proceedings, Faretta v. California grounds a substantive Sixth Amendment right; in federal civil proceedings the right is statutory under 28 U.S.C. § 1654, with Due Process overlays and analogous state protections. Exercising that right requires the litigant to read and understand the law. Statutes, regulations, opinions, and procedural rules are drafted in a specialized convention whose nested syntax, archaic survivals, and divergent terms of art impose cognitive cost beyond what the underlying content requires, a claim documented from Mellinkoff through Tiersma and Kimble and since confirmed by controlled experiment. This Article argues that the cognitive cost of that drafting convention is a cognizable method of administration with disparate impact under Section 504 and ADA Title II, and, secondarily, a cognizable impairment of the access-to-courts right, as to the cognitive subset of the disability rights protected class.1 The statutory claim is primary because the methods-of-administration regulations reach facially neutral administrative architecture directly, without the actual-injury threshold that Lewis v. Casey imposes on the constitutional claim. The argument proceeds in three registers: the statutory disparate-impact register applied to state courts and federally funded legal aid; the constitutional register under Faretta and Tennessee v. Lane; and the structural register extending Bounds v. Smith from the availability of legal materials to their readability. The disparate-impact mechanism is identified and defended on the experimental record rather than asserted. Center-embedded syntax, the feature that controlled study identifies as the largest single driver of processing difficulty in legal text, loads the precise capacity whose limitation defines the protected subset, and the resulting cost is an interaction rather than a constant: every reader pays, and the low-capacity reader pays measurably more. That differential is the tax. The Article develops the doctrine, answers the principal objections that law is inherently technical, that precision requires specialized language, and that difficulty tracks exposure rather than capacity, and identifies remedial pathways from plain-language court forms to statutory drafting reform.

Keywords

  • Section 504
  • Rehabilitation Act
  • ADA Title II
  • Faretta v. California
  • Tennessee v. Lane
  • Bounds v. Smith
  • Lewis v. Casey
  • Alexander v. Choate
  • access to courts
  • pro se representation
  • 28 U.S.C. 1654
  • legalese
  • plain language
  • disparate impact
  • methods of administration
  • center-embedding
  • working memory
  • cognitive accessibility
  • fundamental rights
  • disability rights

Plain language slides

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Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "Pro Se and the Cognitive Tax: Legalese and the Fundamental Right of Access to Courts." Real Safety AI Foundation Legal Research Article, July 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/pro-se-cognitive-tax/

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References (90)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

  1. Footnote 1.28 C.F.R. § 35.130(b)(3) and 45 C.F.R. § 84.68(b)(3), read through the meaningful-access standard of Alexander v. Choate, 469 U.S. 287 (1985).
  2. Footnote 1.430 U.S. 817 (1977), and Tennessee v. Lane, 541 U.S. 509 (2004).
  3. Footnote 2.Faretta v. California, 422 U.S. 806, 819 (1975) (“The right to defend is given directly to the accused; for it is the accused who suffers the consequences if the defense fails.”).
  4. Footnote 3.28 U.S.C. § 1654
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  59. Footnote 81.29 U.S.C. § 794(a).
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  80. Footnote 121.5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A)
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