By Andrew Reed, J.D. candidate, Harvard Law School
STUDENT VOICES: The views expressed below are those of the student author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Access to Justice Lab.
Before the doors open at 8 a.m., a single-file line forms outside 625 Anne Street in Jacksonville, North Carolina. But the people there aren’t waiting for concert tickets or sneakers. They’re waiting to enter the Onslow County Courthouse where they’ll face eviction hearings, serve as jurors, and present their cases in small claims court. And as they enter, they are each told the same thing: no cell phones allowed.
For half of them, this is the first they’ve heard of it. “I really am sorry,” an Onslow County Sheriff’s deputy says to a man who had been told he could not enter the courthouse to attend his child custody hearing.
North Carolina is far from the only jurisdiction with bans on cell phones in courthouses. Virginia has similar rules. In Richmond, a client of Megan Hoburg, an attorney who represents clients pro bono in housing court, chose to hide her cell phone in the bushes outside the courthouse. When the client returned three hours later, the phone was gone. Thieves, Hoburg explained, “know that people will stow away electronics . . . in [the] bushes right by the courthouse, and they kind of watch [for] them.”
To thwart the thieves, people have gotten creative. Outside the Richmond courthouse, some folks dig holes to bury their phones. Others duck into nearby libraries to hide them among the books. In Massachusetts, vendors have set up makeshift phone-sitting services outside the courthouse.
If time permits, and circumstances allow it, the litigant may go home, drop off their phone, and come back. But faced with these cell phone bans, many litigants go home and never return.
Across the country, courthouse cell phone bans pose a significant barrier to entry to the legal system.
Every day, people who need access to our courthouses—people with kids, people with sick family members, people with jobs, people who just need to have their phone with them in case of emergency—are turned away.
Justice should be user-friendly. But policies like cell phone bans make accessing justice impractical for many people. They raise the frictional costs of justice just as much, if not more, than any byzantine legal rule. At least those rules don’t stop people at the door.
All of us pay the price for these policies, but the burden falls most on those least able to bear it. The homeless man who took the bus to court can’t leave his phone in the car. The mother who can’t afford childcare has no way to reach her kids when she goes to contest a traffic ticket. The man about to be evicted from his apartment can’t show the judge all the rent payments he made via Zelle.
The rationale for these bans is simple: Courts must maintain a respectful atmosphere in the courtroom and protect the privacy of these public proceedings from those who would take it upon themselves to record or photograph them.
But here the interests of the courts and the interests of the people conflict.
Cell phone bans may be a good way to keep the peace, but they are a bad way to ensure that everyone has access to justice. This is 2025. For better or worse, people need to have access to their phones. Or, at the very least, people genuinely feel like they need to have access to their phones, which, in the access to justice context, might as well be the same thing.
According to several studies, over fifty percent of Americans experience nomophobia—the fear of being without their mobile phone. We would naturally expect, therefore, that some people will avoid phone-free zones. Consider how few people would go to the mall if they couldn’t bring their phone inside. Whether phones truly are a necessity or not, people behave as though they are. And they will avoid places that demand their phones stay outside.
Phones have more than just a psychological impact, though. A report compiled by a Massachusetts Access to Justice group identified four categories of essential uses for phones in the courthouse: evidence, communication, accessibility, and research. Litigants use their phones to provide evidence like text messages and emails. Parents use them to keep in contact with their kids. Foreign-language speakers use them to translate documents to be able to navigate the system. And litigants can use their phones to access legal self-help guides.
As for the last category, cell phone bans affect pro se litigants the most. These litigants rely on their phones to do on-the-spot legal research such as accessing digital copies of statutes, rules of evidence, and other resources they need to traverse unfamiliar legal terrain.
Well-resourced (which often means well-lawyered) individuals have no such problems. Lawyers know the rules of evidence. They have studied the case law. If they need to quote a case or statute, they know to bring a physical copy.
But thankfully, there are solutions. For one, courts can do an about-face and rescind these rules. Several have already done so. Massachusetts, for example, implemented a cell phone ban in 2015 only to rescind the ban in 2021 after a report commissioned by the Conference of State Court Administrators concluded that “cell phone bans create unacceptable hardships and should be phased out in favor of alternative security measures . . .”
Those alternatives have yet to come to Massachusetts, which has maintained a laissez faire approach to phones in courthouses ever since, but several alternatives do exist that can both serve the interests of the court and preserve the interests of litigants.
Some courts have experimented with security pouches. A person arrives at the courthouse, security locks their phone in a small bag, but the litigant remains in possession of the phone at all times. If they need to use it, they go to an authorized area of the courthouse to get the bag unlocked. These bags are already in common use at comedy shows and concerts to prevent audience members from recording the show.
Some jurisdictions have implemented a locker system in which litigants can store their phones while inside the courthouse.
Unfortunately, there have been no scientific studies done to quantify the impact of cell phone bans and the extent to which those effects can be mitigated using pouches or lockers. This area is ripe for experimentation.
For example, we could pick a jurisdiction with a cell phone ban and randomly select one-quarter of its courts to (a) continue the ban with no accommodations, (b) continue the ban with security pouches, (c) continue the ban with lockers, and (d) end the ban altogether. We could then look to see what effect bans have on variables such as case throughput, failure to appear, and something as simple as daily headcount in the courthouse.
If rearranging court policy for a randomized trial isn’t feasible, we can conduct a synthetic control trial. To do so, we would use data from jurisdictions that currently have cell phone bans to construct a donor pool of control data. By combining this donor pool with historical data from Massachusetts during the period when it had a cell phone ban, we can construct a synthetic version of present-day Massachusetts—one where the ban still exists. This synthetic Massachusetts would then serve as the control group, allowing us to evaluate the impact that lifting the cell phone ban has had on access to justice in Massachusetts courts.
Until one of these trials is completed, the full effects of cell phone bans cannot be known. But as the people of Virginia plant their phones in the ground surrounding the John Marshall Courthouse, one can only say: res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself.
If you’re interested in more details of this project, listen to our Proof Over Precedent podcast episode on the topic.