Why do you think judges impose these restrictions? My theory: most civil litigation involves business entities, and business entities cannot proceed pro se. So when a business entity’s lawyer withdraws, it puts the case into stasis — unless the client has substitute counsel lined up. (And when a lawyer is withdrawing because of lack of payment, it’s not likely that the client is going to have substitute counsel lined up.) This creates a case management headache for judges. Thus, they try to discourage it.

You make excellent points. Thank you

It bugs me. One of the reasons to have a uniform citation system is so that a reader can quickly identify and differentiate the kinds of authority being cited. Which is why it doesn’t bug me that “unpublished” opinions have a different citation format — because they aren’t authority. So the different citation format is a good signal that those cases should be treated differently. But now people are going to read Illinois briefs and opinions and see a crazy quilt of different citation formats for the same kind of authority, and it will be confusing.

This added confusion is pointless. The West citation format is already free, uniform, and universal — at least for “published” opinions. For example, you can get the West cites on Google Scholar. For free.

It’s also impractical. The only place one can get the new Illinois citations is from the Illinois Supreme Court website, as far as I know. And that website is worthless from a legal research standpoint. So where are lawyers going to actually find the citations for Illinois cases?

Westlaw, of course!

Seems to me that any system that is as broadly accessible as possible (i.e., “free” and “freely available”) and is free from error or uncertainty is probably the one we want.

At a time of ever eroding consumer protections, the FDCPA is one of the few laws that generally works as intended, despite being nearly 40 years old and written for a different time. The FDCPA does not prevent attempts to collect debts, rather it only prohibits the use of unfair, abusive, harassing or deceptive means to collect a debt. Are there some problems and gaps? Yes, but it is generally a good workable law. I would attribute this its clarity and brevity.
What this case is really about is Debt collectors trying new tactics and cutting corners.

Perhaps their spending too much on their robo-signers to be able to afford stamps.

Many collectors, though they will deny it, because the are required to send a written notice of rights, actually never send anything in writing to debtors, they simply use the phone. By failing to send debtors a written notice of their rights, collectors are trying to avoid costs but also avoiding notifying debtors that they have several basic rights when dealing with debt collectors, most notably the right to dispute the validity of the debt and the right to request verification of the the debt and the amount owed. It also deprives the debtor of a written record of the communications. It is interesting how many collectors don’t seem to record calls or don’t record all calls to debtors.
The knowledge of one’s rights and who one is dealing with is also at the heart of the Foti line of cases of which this is one.

I also take issue with your assertion that debt collectors are put in a difficult position to comply with the FDCPA.
If debt collectors choose to use the phone, it doesn’t relieve them of their obligation to comply with the fundamental notices required by the law, and nothing obligates the collector to leave a message at all. If they wish to contact a debtor they can easily do so in writing.

While the number of FDCPA cases is rising, (there were likely something over 10,000 filed in 2010) it is actually just a drop in the bucket in trying to address the larger problem of abusive collections, as the FTC received over 78,000 complaints about debt collectors in 2008. The FTC believes that this number does not reflect the entirety of the problem, as many people don’t realize they have rights, and among those that do, the FTC is not the most likely recipient of their complaint, the various state AG’s and the companies themselves are. (Notably debt collection complaints have consistently been at the top of the list for source of complaints to AGs, right there with that other bastion of ethics, car dealers).

One of the greatest flaws with the FDCPA is that it only applies to debt collectors and not the original creditor, which begs the question, why should anybody be able to use abusive, harassing, or deceptive means to collect a debt?