When Justice Is Paywalled: How M.L.B. v. S.L.J. Exposes the Hidden Classism of Family Courts

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“Few consequences of judicial action are so grave as the severance of natural family ties.”
— Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982)

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Introduction: The Illusion of Equal Justice

In theory, we are all equal under the law. In practice, access to justice often hinges on the size of your bank account. Nowhere is this more glaring—or more tragic—than in family court.

While divorce and custody disputes dominate public awareness, far less understood is the routine use of legal fees, procedural traps, and biased discretion to deny poor and marginalized parents their most basic constitutional rights. Many are shocked to discover that you can lose your children permanently without ever receiving a fair hearing, legal representation, or meaningful appeal—simply because you’re broke.

In this article, we revisit a critical yet widely ignored U.S. Supreme Court case, M.L.B. v. S.L.J., and ask why its principles have been discarded in today's family court machinery. With insights from legal advocate Bruce Eden, we explore how the system is weaponized against fit, loving parents—and what must change.

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A Case That Should Have Changed Everything: M.L.B. v. S.L.J. (1996)

In M.L.B. v. S.L.J., a Mississippi mother appealed the state’s decision to terminate her parental rights. But she faced an impossible barrier: the court demanded thousands of dollars in record preparation fees to file her appeal. Because she couldn’t pay, the state tried to block her from appealing altogether.

The Supreme Court ruled this unconstitutional, holding that the state cannot deny access to appellate review when a fundamental liberty—like the parent-child bond—is at stake. The Court recognized the termination of parental rights as “irretrievably destructive” and said due process and equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment require that poverty not be a barrier to justice in such cases.

This landmark case built upon Griffin v. Illinois, which prohibited states from denying criminal appeals to indigent defendants who couldn't afford transcripts. M.L.B. extended this reasoning to the civil sphere—acknowledging that while not every civil matter demands free access, family and liberty matters do.

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The Appellate Trap: When the Remedy Becomes the Racket

As legal advocate Bruce Eden points out, the appellate process—often touted as the constitutional safety valve for unfair rulings—was never designed to help the average citizen. In fact, it was created as a political compromise: a tool to offset public outrage over absolute judicial immunity.

“The appellate process was put in place to offset suing judges for violating litigants' fundamental rights,” Eden explains. “To appease the masses, the judiciary had to come up with a way to cover for immunity that deprived the populace of a remedy to go after bad judges.”

But this supposed check on judicial abuse has mutated into an expensive, opaque, and procedural labyrinth. Rather than provide relief for those harmed by biased or unlawful rulings, the appeals system largely exists to preserve them. According to Eden, upwards of 80 percent of appeals are denied, often on vague or technical grounds, without a single word addressing the substance of the injustice.

Appeals today are a legal theater, where form outweighs function. Litigants are required to follow strict formatting, filing, and timing rules, while the underlying constitutional violations are buried under “procedural default” doctrines and judicial discretion. Few appellate courts offer reasoned opinions for denials. Most issue one-line orders: “Denied. No error found.”

Worse, access to this mirage of review often comes with a $10,000 to $100,000 price tag, and far more if corporate or high-end legal counsel is involved. In large cities like New York or Washington, D.C., appellate attorneys can bill $5,000 an hour. For the average family court litigant—especially a pro se parent already struggling to survive—this isn’t justice. It’s legalized extortion.

And even if a litigant scrapes together the resources to appeal, they're met with a system that wasn't designed to deliver a remedy—but rather to protect the illusion that one exists.

This is why M.L.B. v. S.L.J. matters so much. It momentarily cracked open the judiciary’s carefully constructed shield and acknowledged a painful truth: when the government threatens to permanently sever a parent-child bond, the courts cannot deny due process based on someone’s poverty. But what that ruling did not do—what it couldn’t do—is force the courts to apply that principle fairly, consistently, or affordably.

Today, M.L.B. stands as an exception that proves the rule: unless you can afford to fight for your rights, they don’t really exist.

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The Constitutional Illusion in Today’s Family Courts

Yet today, as Bruce Eden points out, courts across the country routinely ignore M.L.B.. Instead, they cloak their proceedings in a veneer of judicial process while depriving parents of meaningful review:

• Parents denied transcripts, records, or filing rights due to cost

• Judges refusing to recognize constitutional violations in termination proceedings

• Attorneys failing to raise any constitutional arguments, even in obvious due process cases

• Courts structuring proceedings in ways that prevent effective appellate review

“It’s not incompetence. It’s design,” Eden explains. “These are not isolated errors. These are systemic methods to eliminate parents from their children’s lives without accountability—especially poor parents, disabled parents, and politically disfavored ones.”

The result? What looks like justice on the surface is often just a staged production to generate a record that shields the system from challenge.

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No Counsel, No Trial, No Appeal

“Over 10 years, I had 8 attorneys. Not one raised a single constitutional right,” said one parent in Mississippi. “There was no trial, not by any legal definition. It was a mock hearing to paper over what they were doing.”

This story is not unique. It echoes what parents in New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, California, and dozens of other states are saying: the courts have created a class of “unworthy” parents whose rights can be erased on a whim—because they cannot afford to fight back.

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Why This Matters for Every American

If the state can strip you of your children without due process, no right is safe.

Family courts often operate outside public scrutiny, shielded by “confidentiality” and cloaked in judicial immunity. But what M.L.B. and Santosky made clear is that family rights are liberty rights. Terminating them should demand the highest scrutiny—not the lowest.

Yet today, many parents don’t even get a hearing. Or if they do, it’s in a courtroom where evidence is ignored, rights are not explained, and appeals are prohibitively expensive.

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What Needs to Change

Bruce Eden and I agree: the answer begins with demanding enforcement of existing Supreme Court precedent and exposing courts that violate it. Some actions that must be taken:

• Enforce M.L.B.: Ensure no parent is denied an appeal due to inability to pay.

• Train attorneys to raise constitutional objections in family court.

• Hold judges accountable for violating due process rights.

• Create independent judicial oversight boards that include public input.

• Require family courts to provide recorded, transcribed hearings in termination cases.

• Launch federal investigations into pattern and practice violations in family court systems.

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Final Thoughts: Justice Isn’t Just for the Wealthy

When a parent wakes up to find their children ripped away—without cause, without counsel, and without recourse—what we are witnessing is not a failure of the system. It is the system working exactly as designed.

M.L.B. was supposed to protect against that. It’s time we make sure it does.

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About the Authors
Michael Phillips is the founder of the REBUILT Justice Project and Father & Co., platforms dedicated to exposing family court corruption and advocating for parents' rights.
Bruce Eden is a veteran civil rights and family rights advocate who has fought for judicial accountability across multiple states for over 25 years.