As if I needed another reason to be a fan of Richard Posner, the newly-retired U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit judge is blasting the treatment of pro se litigants and vowing to help make the system work better.

“The basic thing is that most judges regard these people as kind of trash not worth the time of a federal judge,” he told Adam Liptak of The New York Times in an interview published on Sept. 11.

Pro se litigants are “almost always people of poor education and often of quite low level of intelligence,” Posner said. “I gradually began to realize that this wasn't right, what we were doing.”