Wild Willpower's Justice Reform Plan:
First Reform—The Justice Accessibility Act
Making Iowa’s Courts Understandable, Usable, and Accessible to the People.

By Sondra Wilson | Updated  August 4, 2026

Iowa’s courts belong to the people.

Article I, section 2 of the Iowa Constitution declares:

“All political power is inherent in the people. Government is instituted for the protection, security, and benefit of the people, and they have the right, at all times, to alter or reform the same, whenever the public good may require it.” [1]

That promise means more than permitting a person to enter a courthouse or create an electronic filing account. A justice system is not meaningfully accessible when ordinary citizens cannot determine which rules apply, locate the decisions that bind the court, understand the consequences of a notice, or correct a harmless mistake before an important right is permanently lost.

I developed the Justice Accessibility Act after years of attempting to navigate Iowa’s courts and administrative systems without counsel.

In two civil-rights cases, represented defendants invoked precedent stating that laypeople who represent themselves must act with the “equal competence” of attorneys and proceed “at their own risk.” I was expected to research pleading, jurisdiction, service, venue, administrative exhaustion, discovery, privilege, preservation, amendment, finality, and appellate procedure while also investigating facts, organizing evidence, meeting deadlines, attending school, and conducting a statewide campaign.

The problem was not simply that I lacked a lawyer. The public system itself did not provide a usable map.

The Justice Accessibility Act would address that failure through four principal commitments:

  1. a plain-English, publicly organized map of Iowa procedure;
  2. a comprehensive searchable archive of the Iowa decisions and United States Supreme Court rulings that bind Iowa courts;
  3. clear notice, standardized assistance, and reasonable opportunities to correct harmless errors before rights are permanently lost; and
  4. practical human and technological assistance for people who must use the courts without counsel.

The Act would not eliminate attorneys, excuse bad faith, weaken legitimate procedural protections, or require judges to favor self-represented litigants. It would make the governing law easier to locate, the procedural path easier to follow, and adjudication more likely to turn upon the merits rather than preventable confusion.

The Justice Gap

 

The Legal Services Corporation reported that low-income Americans received no legal assistance, or insufficient assistance, for 92 percent of the civil legal problems that substantially affected them. Cost was among the most important barriers to obtaining help.²

Private representation is beyond the reach of many working people. Clio’s published billing data reports an average Iowa lawyer rate of approximately $252 per hour, with substantial variation by practice area.³

When a person cannot afford counsel, the underlying problem does not disappear. Eviction, discrimination, debt, custody disputes, insurance denials, contractual claims, and injuries caused by governmental action still carry deadlines and procedural requirements. Many people must either abandon potentially valid rights or enter court alone.

Iowa already provides official forms for some proceedings, guided interviews in selected areas, and access to court navigators who can assist with forms and basic information.⁴ Those resources are valuable. The Justice Accessibility Act would build upon them and extend meaningful assistance across a far broader range of civil proceedings.

The Courthouse Door is Open—But the Map Is Missing

 

Self-represented litigants are generally expected to comply with procedural rules that were written for and are routinely applied by legally trained professionals.

The difficulty is not merely the number of rules. It is the way those rules interact.

A person must determine:

  • which court has jurisdiction;
  • what cause of action applies;
  • what must be alleged in the petition;
  • where venue is proper;
  • how each defendant must be served;
  • which deadlines govern;
  • what evidence may be considered;
  • how discovery is requested;
  • which objections preserve an issue;
  • when amendment is permitted;
  • whether administrative exhaustion is required;
  • what orders are final and appealable;
  • and how an issue must be presented to avoid waiver.

A single dispute can require research across statutes, procedural rules, evidence rules, court decisions, local practices, administrative regulations, and filing-system instructions.

No working parent, student, farmer, laborer, senior, tenant, patient, crime victim, or small-business owner should have to reconstruct that entire system from scattered legal materials merely to understand how to ask a court for relief.

What the Justice Accessibility Act Would Do

 

Priority One: Create a Public Map of Iowa Procedure

1. Review and Simplify Unnecessarily Complex Procedures

 

The Iowa Supreme Court possesses statutory authority to prescribe rules governing judicial administration, courts, judges, and attorneys. [5] A governor therefore cannot rewrite judicial rules by executive order, and the Justice Accessibility Act would respect the separation of powers.

My administration would work with the General Assembly and Judicial Branch to fund a formal review of Iowa’s procedural system and identify rules that are unnecessarily fragmented, duplicative, difficult to locate, or written in language inaccessible to the public.

Simplification would not mean eliminating procedures needed to provide notice, preserve jurisdiction, protect evidence, prevent unfair surprise, or secure the opposing party’s rights. It would mean asking whether the same legitimate purpose can be achieved through rules that are shorter, clearer, better organized, and easier to follow.

The review should give particular attention to procedures governing:

  • commencement of an action;
  • jurisdiction and venue;
  • service;
  • amendment;
  • discovery;
  • administrative exhaustion;
  • preservation of objections and constitutional questions;
  • reconsideration;
  • finality and appeal;
  • and dismissal based upon curable defects.

2. Publish Plain-English Procedural Maps

 

For common categories of cases, Iowa should provide step-by-step public guides explaining:

  • what the proceeding addresses;
  • who may file;
  • where and how it is filed;
  • what facts and documents are ordinarily needed;
  • how service works;
  • which deadlines govern;
  • what happens after filing;
  • what discovery may be available;
  • how hearings and trials operate;
  • how objections and appellate rights are preserved;
  • which errors may cause dismissal or permanent loss of a claim; and
  • where qualified legal help may be found.

For every major procedural rule, the public system should display:

  • the authoritative rule;
  • a plain-language explanation;
  • linked definitions;
  • related rules;
  • commonly encountered examples;
  • applicable forms;
  • deadlines and warnings;
  • and controlling authority interpreting the rule.

The official text would remain authoritative. The explanation would provide the public map that is presently missing.

 

3. Expand Official Forms and Guided Interviews

 

The Iowa Judicial Branch already provides free official forms and interactive resources in selected areas. [6] The Act would expand that model to additional recurring filings suitable for standardized assistance, including appropriate forms for:

  • general civil petitions and answers;
  • motions to amend;
  • requests for extensions;
  • discovery requests and responses;
  • administrative judicial-review petitions;
  • preservation of constitutional issues;
  • fee deferral;
  • motions to reconsider;
  • and notices of appeal.

Each guided process should explain what the filing does, when it may be appropriate, what information is required, what deadlines may apply, and what the form cannot accomplish.

4. Give Clear Notice Before Rights Are Lost

 

A governmental notice should not merely announce a decision when the recipient must take an additional procedural step to preserve judicial review.

Where a withdrawal requirement, appeal deadline, exhaustion rule, service requirement, or other technical step may prevent a person from reaching court, the notice should explain in plain language:

  • what must be done;
  • who must receive it;
  • when it is due;
  • where it must be filed or sent;
  • what may happen if it is missed;
  • and where the correct form or further guidance can be found.

This reform grew directly from my experience with the Iowa Tort Claims Act. I submitted a written claim, received notice that the Attorney General’s Office would investigate it, waited for a final disposition, and later learned that a separate written withdrawal step carried legal significance. A government that knows a procedural requirement may determine whether a citizen ever reaches court should disclose that requirement clearly.

5. Allow Reasonable Correction of Harmless Errors

 

Not every procedural error is harmless. Some failures prejudice another party, impair jurisdiction, destroy evidence, or make fair adjudication impossible.

But where a good-faith mistake causes no material prejudice and can reasonably be corrected, courts should ordinarily consider:

  • identifying the deficiency;
  • allowing amendment;
  • establishing a cure period;
  • staying proceedings while a required administrative step is completed;
  • or dismissing without prejudice rather than permanently extinguishing the claim.

The purpose is not special treatment. It is proportionality.

A curable technical defect should not carry the same consequence as bad faith, repeated defiance, evidence destruction, or conduct that prevents another party from receiving a fair hearing.

Legal Research Remains a Barrier Even After the Rules Are Explained

 

Public legal education would reduce this imbalance, but it would not eliminate another major obstacle: legal research itself can become almost insurmountable for a self-represented person. A litigant must identify the correct legal issue, discover the controlling terminology, locate binding authority, distinguish unfavorable cases, determine whether decisions remain valid, preserve each issue correctly, and present the result in the form the court expects.

A person may possess compelling evidence and a legally recognizable injury yet lose because they did not know the procedural language required to place that injury before the court.

Meanwhile, experienced attorneys can draw from an established body of pro se precedent and place it near the beginning of a dismissal filing. Before the evidence is examined, the citizen’s lack of professional training has already been reframed as a risk the citizen voluntarily assumed.

That gives the represented party an enormous structural advantage.

Priority Two: Create a Comprehensive Public Archive of Controlling law

 

6. Build a Searchable Iowa and United States Supreme Court Case-Law Database

 

Rules cannot be understood in isolation. Courts interpret them through judicial decisions, and those decisions determine what the law means in practice.

The Iowa Judicial Branch publishes recent Supreme Court opinions and provides access to archived opinions. [7] Iowa still lacks a comprehensive, historically deep public research system designed to show ordinary users which decisions bind Iowa courts and whether those decisions remain controlling.

The Act would support a publicly owned database containing:

  • Iowa Supreme Court decisions;
  • Iowa Court of Appeals decisions;
  • historically significant Iowa territorial and appellate decisions;
  • and United States Supreme Court decisions binding upon Iowa courts.

Users should be able to search and browse by:

  • legal topic;
  • constitutional provision;
  • statute;
  • court rule;
  • cause of action;
  • procedural posture;
  • court;
  • date;
  • cited authority;
  • and later treatment.

Each decision should display:

  • the official opinion;
  • the court and date;
  • the legal questions presented;
  • the disposition;
  • the principal authorities relied upon;
  • a neutral plain-language synopsis;
  • and subsequent history showing whether later decisions followed, distinguished, limited, criticized, or overruled it.

The summaries must be neutral, professionally reviewed, and linked directly to the complete controlling text. They would be educational aids—not replacements for reading the opinions themselves.

7. Make Iowa's Legal History Publicly Reachable

 

Iowa law did not begin with the cases presently easiest to find online.

Older decisions continue to shape constitutional rights, property, contracts, public institutions, civil procedure, criminal law, and statutory interpretation. Yet finding and tracing those decisions may require commercial databases, specialized libraries, or substantial prior knowledge.

The public archive should progressively digitize, index, cross-reference, and summarize Iowa’s older appellate decisions.

Public law should not become practically private merely because the easiest research tools require costly subscriptions.

8. Connect Cases, Rules, Statutes, and Definitions

 

A person reading a procedural rule should be able to reach the cases interpreting it. A person reading a judicial opinion should be able to reach the cited statute, constitutional provision, related form, and current procedural guidance.

The public portal should therefore connect:

  • cases to later treatment;
  • rules to interpretive decisions;
  • statutes to relevant cases;
  • unfamiliar terms to accurate definitions;
  • forms to governing rules;
  • and procedural steps to applicable deadlines.

Legal research should not require a person to reconstruct the law from disconnected documents scattered across multiple systems.

Priority Three: Make Self-Representation a Real Right

 

9. Confront the "Equal Competence" Contradiction

 

Iowa precedent states that the law does not judge lawyers and laypeople by two different standards and that people who proceed without counsel do so “at their own risk.”

Equal substantive obligations may be necessary. A court cannot excuse fraud, bad faith, deliberate noncompliance, or material prejudice merely because a litigant lacks an attorney.

But Iowa should confront the contradiction between allowing self-representation and demanding attorney-level procedural competence while withholding the education, research systems, forms, explanatory materials, and institutional support through which attorneys acquire and exercise that competence.

The Act would not create a separate body of substantive law for self-represented people. It would require Iowa to make reasonable public tools available before treating the inability to navigate professionally designed procedures as a risk the citizen voluntarily assumed.

Equal standards do not create meaningful equality when access to the knowledge needed to satisfy those standards remains radically unequal.

Priority Four: Provide Human and Technological Access

 

10. Expand Navigators and Public Law-Library Assistance

 

Iowa’s court-navigator program provides assistance with forms and basic information for self-represented civil litigants. [8] The Act would expand that support geographically and substantively.

Navigators must not provide individualized legal advice without authorization. They can nevertheless help people:

  • locate official resources;
  • understand filing mechanics;
  • identify forms;
  • use electronic filing systems;
  • locate publicly stated deadlines;
  • find courthouse services;
  • distinguish legal information from legal advice;
  • and connect with qualified counsel when individualized advice is necessary.

Iowa should also expand access to public law librarians, research assistance, courthouse computer terminals, printers, scanners, and reliable remote assistance throughout the state.

11. Design for Disability, Language, Rural, and Technology Access

 

Court information should be usable by people who:

  • have visual, hearing, cognitive, or mobility disabilities;
  • use assistive technology;
  • speak limited English;
  • lack reliable broadband;
  • do not own a computer;
  • possess limited digital literacy;
  • or cannot easily travel to a courthouse.

Forms, guides, and databases should be evaluated for:

  • plain-language comprehension;
  • screen-reader compatibility;
  • mobile and print use;
  • translation quality;
  • captioning;
  • color contrast;
  • and cognitive load.

A system is not accessible merely because information technically exists online.

12. Require Public Testing and Continuing Review

 

New procedural maps, databases, forms, and assistance programs should be tested by the people who will use and administer them, including:

  • self-represented litigants;
  • attorneys;
  • clerks;
  • judges;
  • legal-aid providers;
  • law librarians;
  • rural residents;
  • people with disabilities;
  • seniors;
  • working parents;
  • and people with limited English proficiency.

The State should publish regular reports concerning usage, recurring filing defects, abandonment points, navigator demand, accessibility complaints, and proposed improvements.

The Justice Accessibility Act should create durable public infrastructure—not a website launched once and forgotten.

 

What the Act Would Not Do

 

The Justice Accessibility Act would not:

  • guarantee that every claim succeeds;
  • permit judges to disregard statutes or controlling precedent;
  • provide legal advice through automated summaries;
  • eliminate attorneys;
  • excuse bad faith;
  • erase legitimate filing deadlines;
  • or force courts to overlook mistakes that materially prejudice another party.

It would make the rules easier to find, understand, and follow.

That benefits everyone.

Represented parties receive clearer filings.
Clerks spend less time correcting avoidable defects.
Judges receive better-organized records.
Attorneys encounter fewer preventable disputes.
Litigants understand the process earlier.
Cases are more likely to be resolved on the actual legal and factual questions presented.

A Reform That Creates Public-Service Opportunities for Lawyers

This proposal is not an attack upon the legal profession.

Law is difficult. Attorneys spend years developing knowledge of jurisdiction, pleading, evidence, discovery, trial practice, statutory interpretation, research, negotiation, and professional responsibility.

That expertise should remain valued.

The Act would create meaningful public-service and employment opportunities for:

  • attorneys;
  • law professors;
  • law librarians;
  • paralegals;
  • mediators;
  • court administrators;
  • legal technologists;
  • translators;
  • accessibility specialists;
  • educators;
  • and law students working under appropriate supervision.

The objective is not to replace lawyers with forms.

It is to prevent the public’s lack of legal training from becoming the principal obstacle between an injury and a hearing.

Why This Reform Exists

 

I developed this proposal after years of legal self-education and firsthand experience attempting to navigate Iowa’s courts without counsel.

In Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al. and Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa, represented parties invoked procedural doctrines while seeking dismissal of claims I was attempting to develop without professional assistance. The State case’s amended petition included the Justice Accessibility Act among the prospective reforms I asked the State to consider, including simplified procedural instructions, templates, an organized case-law database, and practical legal education.

The court did not enact those reforms.

I am now placing the proposal before the people of Iowa through democratic government.

Read the record behind this reform: Iowa’s Broken Judiciary

Related Reforms

 

The Justice Accessibility Act is one part of a larger plan.

Reform Two—Practical Law for Every Iowa Student 
Teaching young people how contracts, rights, evidence, legal records, and government procedures affect their lives.

Reform Three — The Client Right to Review 
Requiring informed client authorization for pleas, settlements, material admissions, waivers, and other decisions capable of permanently altering legal rights.

Reform Four — A Civil-Rights Process That Does Not Hide the Record (coming soon)
Reforming file access, closure notices, appeal procedures, retaliation safeguards, and transparency within Iowa’s civil-rights system.

Reform Five — Public Review of Government Immunity Doctrines 
Examining when immunity doctrines prevent meaningful remedies for malicious, corrupt, or knowingly unconstitutional governmental conduct.

From Vision to Law

 

Because authority over Iowa’s justice system is divided among the people, General Assembly, Judicial Branch, executive agencies, counties, and constitutional officers, no governor can implement this entire proposal alone.

As governor, I would:

1. Introduce legislation and budget proposals;

2. Convene a bipartisan Justice Accessibility Commission;

3. Request formal Judicial Branch cooperation and rule review;

4. Fund pilot projects, public testing, and statewide access;

5. Publish recommendations and place unresolved structural questions before the General Assembly and the people.

Popular sovereignty does not mean one official controls every branch.

It means public institutions must remain answerable to the people they were created to serve.

Liberty and Justice Must Be Usable

 

We teach Iowa’s children to pledge allegiance to “liberty and justice for all.”

Those words become hollow when justice is available in theory but unreachable in practice.

A democratic court system should not require ordinary people to purchase a professional interpreter before they can understand how to preserve a right, answer an accusation, submit evidence, or request relief.

The law should not become easier to weaponize than to understand.

Justice must be understandable, accessible, and accountable to the people.

From Vision to Victory
How You Can Help Make This Plan Happen

 

Wild Willpower PAC exists to help translate lived experience, legal research, and public testimony into practical democratic reform.

Your contribution helps support endorsed candidates—including my campaign and future candidates committed to Wild Willpower’s principles—while funding the continued development of WildWillpower.org, public-policy research, educational materials, outreach, and upcoming publications.

The ongoing court record explains why many of these reforms are necessary. Documenting that history, developing the proposals, and making the information publicly accessible have become full-time work. PAC contributions support the lawful political and educational work of carrying those lessons into the public arena.

Learn more about Wild Willpower PAC.

Support the work by donating below.

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    Endnotes

     

    1. Iowa Constitution, article I, section 2. The provision states that political power is inherent in the people and recognizes their right to alter or reform government whenever the public good may require it.

    2. Legal Services Corporation, The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans (2022). LSC reported that low-income Americans received no legal help, or insufficient help, for 92 percent of their substantial civil legal problems.

    3. Clio, “How Much Should I Charge as a Lawyer in Iowa?” Clio reports that, as of its 2025 data, Iowa lawyers averaged approximately $252 per hour, while rates varied significantly by practice area. This is billing-platform data, not a universal legal-fee schedule.

    4. Iowa Judicial Branch, “Representing Yourself.” The Judicial Branch provides forms, selected self-help resources, and appointment access to court navigators for basic form and process assistance.

    5. Iowa Code §§ 602.1204–602.1206. These provisions assign the Iowa Supreme Court responsibility for judicial-branch procedures, court administration, and rules supervising judges and attorneys.

    6. Iowa Judicial Branch, “Court Forms.” Iowa currently provides free official forms and interactive resources in selected areas.

    7. Iowa Judicial Branch, “Supreme Court Opinions.” The Judicial Branch publishes recent opinions and links to archived opinions; the proposal described here would add deeper historical coverage, topic organization, neutral summaries, and citator-like subsequent-history information.

    8. Iowa Judicial Branch, “Representing Yourself.” Court navigators may assist with forms and basic information but do not replace individualized legal representation.