When you hear a judge praised for his literary skill in writing opinions, remember the fate of Carrie Buck [Terry Teachout]
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Posts tagged as:
judges
By Peter Robinson, at Uncommon Knowledge (site):
Lawyering is an essential component of democratic capitalism, but too much lawyering can be too much of a good thing. A disproportionate amount of our talent in the United States goes into law as opposed to business, which creates wealth. Lawyers redistribute the wealth, but they do not generally produce wealth.
Judge Silberman’s classic 1978 article, “Will Lawyering Strangle Democratic Capitalism?” — originally published at my old magazine Regulation, though before my time there — is available in PDF form from Cato here.
Related: “Scalia: ‘We Are Devoting Too Many of Our Best Minds to’ Lawyering” [WSJ Law Blog]
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Don’t miss: Abdon Pallasch of the Chicago Sun-Times takes a look “inside the beast” at how the Cook County Democratic Party “slates” its judges. Women with Irish-sounding names do best with voters:
That’s why lawyers of Jewish or other ancestry often legally adopt Irish names to run for judge here. That’s why when party leaders slate men without Irish names, such as William Haddad, who would have been the first Arab-American full-circuit judge in Cook County, the party must recruit Irish women lawyers to run as “ringers” or “stalking horses” to flood the ballot and fracture the Irish-woman vote.
There’s a Corboy & Demetrio angle, too. And the National Law Journal covers the controversy over the Cook County Clerk’s decision to accept paid lawyer advertising on her office’s website (earlier).
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“Prosecutors say a group of top lawyers and doctors conspired to collect millions in inflated damages by pushing accident victims into dubious surgery.” Riveting, detail-filled account of the alleged involvement of numerous Nevada lawyers and as many as 20 doctors in what prosecutors say was boldly and systematically organized misconduct, with even some sectors of the judiciary in the state at best cowed by the scheme’s managers. An elegant touch: physicians who played ball are said to have been assured protection from malpractice suits from many feared attorneys, while those not in on the scheme appear in some cases to have been at extra peril. This looks to be one of the year’s most important ventures into investigative journalism on the underside of litigation — don’t even think of missing it [Katherine Eban, Fortune, Aug. 19] More: discussed by Darleen Click and commenters, Protein Wisdom.
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If you’re a judge annoyed at a court worker’s parking her car in a restricted parking space at the courthouse, don’t take it upon yourself to let the air out of her tires [Maryland circuit court judge Robert Nalley, who's stepping down from an administrative post but not from the bench after conceding the bit of self-help in question; Washington Post]
“I didn’t like the case…” A Louisiana judge finds herself in trouble (via Judges on Merit and Dan Pero, who draw somewhat different lessons). More: affidavit by former judge central to FBI probe says he didn’t consider attempt at improper influence to be a success.
They’ve got the Illinois Constitution — or at least their power to read things into the ambiguities and interstices of that document — and they’re not afraid to use it. [ABA Journal] Scott Greenfield has some comments on the equal protection ruling and its policy implications.
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I’m one of the participants in an online symposium at Reason on who can, should or will serve as President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee. I have kind words for Walter Dellinger III, mixed views on “empathy”, and predict that the current surge of activist federal economic policy will contribute to the Court’s docket in coming years. The full list of participants: Radley Balko, Alan Gura, Wendy Kaminer, Manuel Klausner, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Walter Olson, Roger Pilon, Glenn Reynolds, Damon W. Root, Ilya Shapiro, Harvey Silverglate, Ilya Somin, and Jacob Sullum.
For reasons that should be fairly obvious, there’s quite a bit I disagree with in Eric Turkewitz’s impassioned defense (in the context of selecting potential judicial nominees) of injury and criminal-defense lawyers. But I’m still glad I read it.
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It’s thought to be the longest judgment ever handed down in Australia [Andrew Main, "Banks must pay $1.58bn in compensation for Bell asset grab", The Australian, Apr. 30]
“It is axiomatic that ‘Judge’ and ‘Stripper’ showing up in a headline is never a good thing, especially if you happen to be the ‘Judge.’” — Daniel Ruth, Tampa Tribune, via Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch (on disgraced Florida appellate judge Thomas Stringer)(earlier).
And a Fifth Circuit panel eats him alive.
Former state Superior Court judge Michael Joyce, of Erie, “was sentenced this afternoon to nearly four years in prison.” Joyce’s bogus claims of neck and back pain after a rear-ending had netted him $440,000 in settlements; “the judge filed his claims on judicial letterhead, [Assistant U.S. Attorney Christian] Trabold said, and referred to himself as a judge 115 times in the letters.”
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Last year New York trial judge Herman Cahn ruled in favor of class-action giant Milberg in a high-profile dispute over whether it could share its winnings from past cases with disgraced felon and former name partner Melvyn Weiss, the firm’s former driving force. Judge Cahn stepped down from the New York bench in December, and now it develops has been hired by Milberg as its “distinguished” new attorney. And you — with the Wall Street Journal’s editorialists today — certainly have a suspicious mind. There probably won’t be any shortage of funds with which to pay the former jurist: an American Lawyer headline last month read “Milberg Among Plaintiffs Firms Awarded $120 Million in Xerox Class Action”.
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ABA Journal: “Hiring — and trusting — a disbarred lawyer known for his 1980s involvement in a bizarre condoms-for-chickens scam was a mistake, a retired Michigan judge says.”
Two senior judges in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, have taken a plea agreement under which they will serve seven years in prison. The judges are “alleged to have pocketed $2.6 million in payments from juvenile detention center operators”. After helping the center operators secure a county contract, according to their critics, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan then proceeded to railroad hundreds of kids to the centers on petty charges to provide the operators with a clientele to serve (Philadelphia Inquirer, Legal Intelligencer, Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader and more via Instapundit)
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Well, that sounded plausible enough. Who knew there’d turn out to be more to the story?
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The judge, who agreed in August to leave the bench, was called up for discipline after a furor over the “fascinatingly repellent” letters he sent to the Boston Herald demanding settlement after he secured a libel judgment of more than $2 million against the paper; further embarrassments ensued. [Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch]
