354
Opinion of the Court
It must be acknowledged that several statements in Bounds went beyond the right of access recognized in the earlier cases on which it relied, which was a right to bring to court a grievance that the inmate wished to present, see, e. g., Ex parte Hull, 312 U. S., at 547-548; Griffin v. Illinois, 351 U. S., at 13-16; Johnson v. Avery, 393 U. S., at 489. These statements appear to suggest that the State must enable the prisoner to discover grievances, and to litigate effectively once in court. See Bounds, 430 U. S., at 825-826, and n. 14. These elaborations upon the right of access to the courts have no antecedent in our pre-Bounds cases, and we now disclaim them. To demand the conferral of such sophisticated legal capabilities upon a mostly uneducated and indeed largely illiterate prison population is effectively to demand permanent provision of counsel, which we do not believe the Constitution requires.
Finally, we must observe that the injury requirement is not satisfied by just any type of frustrated legal claim. Nearly all of the access-to-courts cases in the Bounds line involved attempts by inmates to pursue direct appeals from the convictions for which they were incarcerated, see Douglas v. California, 372 U. S. 353, 354 (1963); Burns v. Ohio, 360 U. S., at 253, 258; Griffin v. Illinois, supra, at 13, 18; Cochran v. Kansas, 316 U. S. 255, 256 (1942), or habeas petitions, see Johnson v. Avery, supra, at 489; Smith v. Bennett, 365 U. S. 708, 709-710 (1961); Ex parte Hull, supra, at 547- 548. In Wolff v. McDonnell, 418 U. S. 539 (1974), we extended this universe of relevant claims only slightly, to "civil rights actions"—i. e., actions under 42 U. S. C. § 1983 to vindicate "basic constitutional rights." 418 U. S., at 579. Significantly, we felt compelled to justify even this slight extension of the right of access to the courts, stressing that "the demarcation line between civil rights actions and ha-materials," finding a prisoner with a claim affected by this extremity will probably be easier than proving the extremity.
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