Saturday, March 28, 2015
Those busy and cranky judges and those pesky litigants
I hear often that judges are "busy", they are "frustrated", and, therefore, we the litigants (and their attorneys) should not take the judge's valuable time with lengthy pleadings.
In one of the CLE courses I recently had, the presenter of the course expressly called presenting to the court of all of the issues that an attorney can possibly raise on an appeal as a weakness and a receipt for failure, because the court will be discouraged to "read that all".
I refer you to my blog TL-DR ("too long, did not read"), where I touched on that issue before.
But, there is also these aspects to the problem of "busy and frustrated judges".
1/ who is whose servant - aren't judges public servants that serve the sovereign (the public) at the sovereign's pleasure during good behavior only, and isn't frustration at a litigant for raising all issues that present themselves in the record, the litigant's due process right and the judge's duty to review?
2/ a judge is not dragged into the judicial office by his hair or other bodily parts. A judge comes there voluntarily, moreover, in New York a judge has to "win" a rigorous election campaign - and get funding for that campaign. In New York, most judges must be lawyers with at least 10 years of experience. 10 years is more than enough to learn that court dockets are overcrowded and courts are understaffed.
If, knowing all that, an attorney runs for a judge, shouldn't he then deal with the inevitable time-constraints, overcrowded dockets, understaffed courts and associated stress levels without taking it out on litigants and their attorneys who have constitutional rights to due process, access to courts and impartial judicial review - and not by cranky judges who are "too busy" to provide a detailed review of all issues that the litigant wants to present to the court.
Otherwise, judicial review may not legitimately be called "an opportunity to be heard", right?
No comments:
Post a Comment