Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Price of Proof: New Hampshire Courts Bill the Poor for Justice

The state will waive your filing fee. It will not waive the copies, the transcript, the witness, or the lawyer sitting at the other table.

The New Hampshire Judicial Branch publishes a page on how to get ready for your hearing. It tells you that you are responsible for giving the other side copies of all your documents ahead of time, that you should bring extra copies with you, and that if you show up without the proper number the judge may have to delay your case. Sensible advice. Now read it again with four dollars in your checking account.

Full disclosure: the editor is a self-represented litigant in New Hampshire courts and writes from direct experience with the costs described below.

At the clerk’s counter, the court copies documents for 50 cents a page. The public kiosk prints for a quarter a page. Say your evidence runs forty pages: bank statements, photographs, a police report, the text messages that prove your side. One set for the judge, one for the other party, one for the witness stand, one for you. That is 160 pages. At the courthouse rate, handing the court the truth costs $80.

This is the part of poverty and the courts that never makes the brochure. The filing fee gets the attention, and the filing fee can be waived. Almost nothing else can. The system runs on a promise of formal equality, with the Judicial Branch’s own guide saying self-represented litigants are “subject to the same rules of law and evidence” as parties with lawyers, while pricing every procedural act in dollars the poorest litigants do not have. Same rules, different wallets. That is a home game for whoever brought money.

What the waiver waives

Start with what the law gets right, because there is something.

In practice you file a Motion to Waive Filing Fee with a sworn Statement of Assets and Liabilities, ideally at the same moment you file the case, and a judge decides whether your poverty is poor enough. Note the verb. The statute says the court may waive the fee, in its discretion. Nobody is entitled to it.

And look at the boundary line. The statute reaches fees payable to a court, a clerk, or a sheriff — the door charge. It does not buy paper, toner, a working printer, the internet connection required to use the mandatory e-filing system, gas to the courthouse, the shift you lose to a Tuesday hearing, or one hour of a lawyer’s time. The waiver stops at the courthouse cash register. Everything past that register is on you.

The state even found a way to make paying harder. As of September 3, 2025, every electronic court transaction made with a credit or debit card through the File & Serve or TurboCourt platforms carries a 3 percent processing surcharge, and the card terminals at the clerk’s window add the same. Small claims cases, meanwhile, must be filed electronically unless the court grants an exemption. So the litigant with the least money, filing in the forum built for ordinary people, pays a technology tax to reach the docket at all.

Proof is a paper product

The rules of evidence do not care what evidence costs. The court’s posted schedule does the pricing: 50 cents a page for copied material, 25 cents a page to print from the court’s own kiosks, $10 for a certificate, $10 plus copy fees for certification, and $25 if you want the audio recording of your own hearing. Your case file is a public record you are welcome to inspect for free. Owning any of it costs money.

That sentence is the whole problem in official typeface. The consequence of empty pockets is procedural: your hearing waits. Superior Court has moved toward digital evidence for most civil and criminal cases through a platform called CaseLines, which helps the parties who reach that court. But the circuit courts, where poverty litigates (evictions, small claims, parenting orders), still run hearings on paper in hand. A phone full of screenshots is not three collated exhibit sets, and no judge is passing a cracked Android around the bench.

The library helps until it doesn’t. Public printing runs a dime to a quarter a page in most towns, the hours end at five, and the print job still needs a ride to the courthouse. None of this is exotic hardship. It is the ordinary arithmetic of being broke, applied to the one building where losing the arithmetic can cost you your housing or your kid.

The appeal you can’t afford

Lose below, and the price goes up. The New Hampshire Supreme Court’s own FAQ explains that without a transcript, the court will generally assume the evidence supported the trial court’s result and review only for errors of law — citing its decision in Bean v. Red Oak Property Management. Translation: no transcript, no real look at what happened in your courtroom.

Transcripts are produced by eScribers, the private contractor designated as transcriber for all New Hampshire courts, at rates approved by court order, with a deposit due up front. The court’s transcript order form is blunt about the stakes: fail to pay the deposit by the deadline and your appeal can be dismissed. Not because your argument was weak. Because your balance was. In this state, the second look at a verdict is sold, and the return policy is dismissal.

No lawyer is coming

Criminal defendants facing jail get appointed counsel. Civil litigants get a handshake and a self-help page, no matter what is on the table: the apartment, the children, the paycheck, the record that follows you. The Judicial Branch reminds you that the same rules of evidence bind you either way.

The numbers on the other side of that handshake are grim. Nearly 85 percent of cases in New Hampshire’s circuit courts involve at least one unrepresented party, according to reporting in the New Hampshire Bar Association’s Bar News, which cites the Judicial Branch’s own Access to Justice Commission. One in five Granite Staters is poor enough to qualify for free legal aid. The aid does not stretch: 603 Legal Aid’s deputy director told Bar News the organization rejected 684 cases in 2023 for lack of resources, and the National Center for Access to Justice’s Justice Index puts New Hampshire below one legal aid attorney for every 10,000 residents in poverty. “Civil legal aid in general is understaffed,” is how 603 Legal Aid’s Emma Sisti put it. Nationally, the Legal Services Corporation’s 2022 Justice Gap study found low-income Americans got no help or not enough for 92 percent of the civil legal problems that hit them substantially.

Federal court is no refuge. Its in forma pauperis statute sounds generous until you read the operative words.

Sit with that last one. You can subpoena the witness who saw what happened to you — if you can pay the witness fee yourself. The regulation admitting this has sat on the books for decades. Congress did not forget the poor when it wrote these rules. It priced them in, then priced them out.

The other table never runs out of paper

Now look across the aisle. When your opponent is a town, an insurer, a landlord with a property manager, or a state agency, it litigates on an institutional budget. Its copies come out of a supply closet. Its lawyer is a line item someone else pays. A continuance costs it a calendar entry; the same continuance costs you a lost shift, a ride you had to beg, and childcare you cannot cover twice.

That asymmetry is the quiet weapon. Money buys time as surely as it buys lawyers, and time wins cases, because the side that can wait can outlast the side that cannot. Every delayed hearing, every motion that demands a response, every document demand measured in reams tilts the outcome before a judge weighs a single fact. The rules are identical for both tables. The price of using them is not, and everyone in the building knows which table feels it.

What would fix it

None of this requires a constitutional amendment. Most of it is arithmetic and a signature.

First, the cheapest fix: the copy, certification, or audio charges on the court’s own schedule are, in the statute’s words, fees payable to a court or clerk. RSA 499:18-b already reaches them. A standing order that a granted fee waiver covers a party’s reasonable copy and audio costs in that case would end the $80 exhibit problem tomorrow, at a cost the Judicial Branch would struggle to notice. Second, an indigent transcript fund for civil appeals, so no appeal in this state dies of nonpayment before a justice reads a word of it. Third, fund 603 Legal Aid and New Hampshire Legal Assistance at a level where 684 turned-away cases becomes zero, and keep growing the paraprofessional pilot the legislature already approved. Fourth, publish the numbers: how many fee waivers are filed each year, how many get granted, how many get denied, by court. If the system believes its waiver works, the data should be easy to share. I have asked for it.

The words carved over the United States Supreme Court read Equal Justice Under Law. New Hampshire’s version is posted at the clerk’s window in smaller print: 50 cents a page. Until the waiver reaches past the front door, justice in this state has a cover charge, and the people who most need to get in are the ones it keeps outside.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against primary sources before publication; see the fact-check table. Two caveats. Several courts.nh.gov pages block automated retrieval; where a page could not be opened directly, its text was confirmed from extended excerpts of the official page and the table says so. Filing-fee dollar amounts were deliberately left out of the body because the Judicial Branch’s posted schedules show differing figures across revisions (the fee schedule PDF hosted at courts.nh.gov is dated December 2021; a July 2025 revision with higher amounts also circulates); the per-page copy, kiosk, audio, and certificate figures cited come from the schedule as posted. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.