Le Devoir Article on Vexatious Litigants

This is a follow up to the Library Boy post of January 18, 2016 entitled Le Devoir Feature Article on Growing Problem of Vexatious Litigants.

Vexatious liigants are aggressive litigants who take their grievances to an extreme, inundating courts and tribunals with numerous detailed complaints and multiplying procedures, and often abusing staff with threatening language.

In today's issue of the French-language Montreal daily Le Devoir,  there is another article about the phenomenon.

The problem has become so bad that Québec authorities have created a registry of abusive litigants who need to obtain the green light from a  judge before they can lodge a complaint in front of any court or tribunal. There are some 175 individuals on the list.

The article quotes Sylvette Guillemard, professor at the Law Faculty of Université Laval in Quebec City. She is supervising a PhD thesis by a student of psychoanalysis and psychopathology at Université Paris 7. The thesis is about people with "délires de revendication" (frenzies of demands or claims).

Guillemard explains that vexatious litigants tend to be men between the ages of 40 and 60, highly intelligent, self-represented and convinced of their superiority over everyone including judges and lawyers.