There's absolutely nothing wrong with pro se being an option for the desperate, however it rose out of a culture that was not mired in lawfare as ours now is. People simply didn't go around suing as often as they do now.
It's one of the many many things that should be refined, but given the current state of politics, it's probably for the best to not touch it rather than let some assholes make it worse.
There's a lot of that in our system, designed for a self-regulating society instead of an atomized, min-maxing bunch of special interests.
The quickest fix for
pro se litigations is probably limiting the kind of judgements they can get. Filing
pro se against a former roomate to get 3 months of back rent is probably fine, the other side can appear
pro se and have the court settle things. The stakes are small and non-life ruining. It's probably also fine to file against the government, things like injunctions or FOIA that counter the pressure a state agency can bring against citizens with vastly fewer resources.
Being able to shut down businesses, get huge judgements, stifle free speech, and other major outcomes require the other side to lawyer up. It creates an automatic disparity in resources spent to pursue justice. If you're going to demand a serious expenditure of time and money from an opponent, you should either be capped on the damage you can do, or be held liable for the consequences of abusing the system.
There's an obvious balancing act that needs to happen, and I think the system has grown to the point where the numbers are skewed. Things like $10k limits or $75k thresholds of claimed damage are antiquated "large numbers" that haven't kept up with the cost of lawyers themselves. Greer's case is a classic example of leveraging the system against a small business that can't afford the expenditure to ward off a business-ending judgement. The current "fixes" (vexatious litigant designation, unreliable lawyer fee recovery, getting useful precedents) are not sufficient, and they require damage be done to the other party before they can be applied.
Someone needs to sit down and have a serious debate about the cost of accessible justice vs the damage it causes, but I bet the "100 guilty men go free rather than 1 innocent go to jail" system doesn't have much appetite for pragmatism.
