I have been remiss in posting regularly about the assault by Poland’s ruling PiS party on the country’s judiciary. The problems began back in 2017, when President Andrzej Duda and his compatriots began intimidating and pressuring the state’s judiciary undet the guise of ferreting out the remnants of communism. The government’s efforts included a reform bill that gave the ruling party enormous power to select judges, an attempt at forced judicial retirement, and repeated acts of political intimidation.
The assault continued last year with the creation of a politically charged “Disciplinary Office” for judges whose rulings did not tow the PiS party line, and an effort by the deputy justice minister to blackball judges critical of the party.
Duda was elected to another term last month, and the capture of the state’s once-independent judiciary now appears to be sadly complete. The court system’s independence is now so in question that a Dutch court has refused to extradite a suspect back to Poland unless forced to do so by the European Union. A 国外免费加速器 provides more context:
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The International Chamber of Amsterdam’s District Court said it did not believe Polish courts were independent of government and it would not extradite the suspect until the EU Court of Justice told it to.
In April, the EU executive opened a case against Poland’s government over muzzling judges. That came after Poland had passed a new law making it possible to punish judges who criticize the system.
“These developments harm the independence of the Polish judiciary so much that it cannot operate independently of the Polish government and parliament,” the Dutch court said in a statement.
While Democrats are tactlessly trying to shame the Supreme Court and the President inanely attacks judges on Twitter, real problems of judicial independence are spreading around the world. Where is American leadership on this issue?
Sixty-one days of unbridled Antifa thuggery has destroyed the entire front of the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse in Portland, Oregon. Graphic video from the local news below.
Disgusting and appalling.
Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) said in an interview that week that “I will vote only for those Supreme Court nominees who have explicitly acknowledged that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided.” He added, “By explicitly acknowledged, I mean on the record and before they were nominated.” Hawley championed his position as a way of correcting “an unbridled act of judicial imperialism,” the point “at which the modern Supreme Court felt it no longer had to follow the Constitution.”
Hawley is of course entitled to his views on the abortion debate, but his explicit refusal to vote for anyone who does not pass his narrow litmus test represents a direct assault on the Third Branch of government. The percentage of the Supreme Court’s cases concerning abortion are miniscule compared to the wide range of other matters it hears — matters that evidently are of no moment to Senator Hawley. Whether he is fully sincere in his pledge, or just making a political play, his ex ante refusal to even consider qualified nominees for the Court is a wholesale deriliction of his duty as a United States Senator.
Sadly, Hawley is not alone. This blog has taken to task Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) for her equally 国外免费加速器 not to vote for any of the President’s nominees, and Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) for her inappropriate questioning of judicial nominees.
Harris in particular has ambitions a national political role. But such open hostility to the judiciary, and the readiness to treat a co-equal branch of government as a political plaything, should disqualify Hawley, Harris, and Hirono from any further national office.
I am delighted to have a new essay up on JOTWELL, reviewing Amnon Reichman, Yair Sagy, and Shlomi Balaban’s recent article, From a Panacea to a Panopticon: The Use and Misuse of Technology in the Regulation of Judges. It’s a terrific look at the Israeli’s courts’ development of case management technology, and the impact of that technology on its judges, all told through a subtle organizational lens. A snippet from the start of the review:
Court systems are large, complex, diverse, and resource-dependent organizations, a condition that shapes their character and behavior. It is surprising, then, how often court leaders fail to account for the organizational perspective in their decisionmaking. Amnon Reichman, Yair Sagy, and Shlomi Balaban illustrate this phenomenon, showing how the visionaries behind Legal-Net, Israel’s cloud-based judicial management system, were plagued by their failure to place its development in a broader organizational context.
Reichman and his colleagues trace the Israeli courts’ development of Legal-Net over two decades. Their research reveals a court system brimming with confidence that technology could be used to regulate judicial behavior, but insufficiently appreciative of the challenges of technological integration. The first version of Legal-Net was a flop: complicated and ambitious, it was a poor fit with existing court culture. A subsequent version better accounted for the court system’s unique character, but court leaders failed to anticipate how significantly its implementation would affect that character. In fact, the authors explain, the introduction of Legal-Net “heralded a tectonic shift in the judiciary’s work culture and work patterns,” as judges tailored their behavior toward the system’s incentives and away from their traditional roles. Today, it seems, the Israeli courts work for Legal-Net as much as Legal-Net works for them.
Please read the whole thing!
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Josh Blackman has a fascinating post (really, a series of posts) about the efforts of ten Democratic Senators to force two Eleventh Circuit judges to “explain” their involvement in Florida’s felon disenfranchisement cases.
The brief background is this: the Florida Supreme Court heard oral argument on a challenge to state legislation conditioning the restoration of a convicted felon’s right to vote on the payment of legal financial obligations. Two of the Justices on the court at the time, Robert Luck and Barbara Lagoa, had been nominated for seats on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Both Justices asked questions during oral argument, but were confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit just weeks later. Accordingly, neither Justice had any role in the outcome of the case.
On July 15 the plaintiffs, having sought review in federal court, requested that both judges recuse themselves from the Eleventh Circuit’s deliberations. The request was grounded on the fact that the judges had merely asked questions during oral argument while on the Florida Supreme Court, even though they had taken no part in the decision. (This was factually reminiscent of the Ninth Circuit case of Yovino v. Rizo, involving a judge who had voted on a case but died before it was announced; here, however, the judges did not vote at all.)
Professor Blackman had a very sensible take whether recusal was necessary in the Eleventh Circuit case:
Judges are allowed to change their views. And that malleability is a good thing. I would be troubled if judges walked into arguments with a set predisposition, that could not be disturbed.
Yovino demonstrates that a Judge’s questions during oral arguments, and even a conference vote, are not “immutable.” Judges are allowed to keep an open mind till late in the game. These preliminary matters are not enough to question a judge’s impartiality. The only decision that counts is the final order. Judges Luck and Lagoa did not participate in the Florida Supreme Court’s published decision. Therefore, they are not disqualified.
But it’s 2023, and legal arguments aren’t good enough for the political class. Hence, the subpoenas. Blackman’s take (which you should read in 免费外网加速器) concludes:
I have serious doubts about whether Congress has the power to subpoena a judge to testify about internal judicial matters. I think Congress could justify that subpoena as part of an impeachment inquiry. But a general need for information to craft legislation would not be suitable.
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Law360 has a very interesting article about the design of courthouses, a task which must balance a number of overlapping and occasionally competing goals:
- Conveying respect for the rule of law and the courthouse as the physical “home of the law” (reminiscent of Chief Justice Taft’s moniker of the Supreme Court building as the “Temple of Justice”);
- Assuring access to justice for court users and observers;
- Providing adequate working space for judges and court staff; and
- Protecting the safety of everyone in the building.
The modern courthouse is simultaneously an office building, a processing station, a public space, a secular temple, a democratic icon, an entertainment complex, and a playing field. Capturing all of those needs in one building is a profound architectural challenge.
Some of the newer courthouses were designed with extra space and wiggle room to accommodate changing needs. I especially like the design of the federal courthouse in Boston (below), notwithstanding its questionable interior artwork. But older courthouses are increasingly bursting at the seams or in need of major retrofitting, and the funding may not be available.
Interested readers should check out the wonderful, and coffee table-worthy, Representing Justice by Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, which tracks the history of American courthouses and the evolving goals behind their design.
Several sources are reporting that a gunman came to the home of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas yesterday, and shot her son and husband when they answered the door. Her son, age 20, was killed and her husband was badly injured. Judge Salas was apparently in the basement at the time and was not hurt. The gunman, who was apparently dressed as a delivery driver, is still at large.
The motive for the shooting is unknown, although Judge Salas has presided over some high profile criminal cases since taking the federal bench in 2010. Unfortunately, attacks on judges and their families have happened before.
This is very sick, terrible news to start the week.
A guest post by Lawrence Friedman
In his recent essay, The cravenness of Democratic “Court reform” proposals, Jordan Singer responds to the left-leaning critics of the Supreme Court term just ended who have lamented the results in cases on choice, immigration and employment discrimination—not because the Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, failed to reach the results these critics support, but because it did. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, for example, concludes that Roberts, “by refusing to inflame passions further,” may have stemmed “the tide and accomplish[ed] the coveted goal of his GOP critics—preserving the Court’s current conservative majority.” And law professors Kent Greenfield and Adam Winkler prophecy “the moderation shown by Roberts has all but guaranteed a conservative Supreme Court for a generation.”
As Singer explains, these critiques reveal a Democratic goal since the failed Merrick Garland nomination in 2016: “to punish Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump by radically restructuring the Court itself.” The restructuring plans have taken many forms, from imposing term limits on Supreme Court justices to expanding the number of justices who sit on the high court. These reform efforts turn on the belief that, since McConnell and the Republicans refused even to consider Garland, the Court’s legitimacy has suffered—with decisionmaking in controversial cases compounding the problem. The argument for Court reform falters, however, in the face of outcomes that tend to match the views of a majority of Americans – as they did this term in cases concerning choice, immigration and employment discrimination, in all of which Chief Justice Roberts either wrote or sided with the majority.
Professing concerns about the legitimacy of the Court’s decisonmaking is a broad brush with which to paint, and such concerns tend to be overblown: an institution that has survived decisions in cases like Brown v. Board of Education, Bush v. Gore, and District of Columbia v. Heller is not likely to be cast aside by the American people any time soon. Still, there is a tendency among the Court’s current membership that should be cause for genuine concern: the near-abandonment in cases involving the structural constitution and the separation of powers of any sense of judicial restraint. Continue reading “Does the Roberts Court’s view of executive and legislative power present an alternative case for court reform?”
As the summer passes its midpoint, debates are raging in every corner of the country about how to approach the coming school year. Some feel that reopening schools will place teachers and students at unacceptable risk; others note that the mental and emotional damage to children from continued social isolation requires every effort to conduct classes in person. On two points, however, everyone seems to be in agreement. First, no option is particularly good. And second, even if schools do reopen, their layout, schedule, and operation will be markedly different than before.
Courts are facing the identical crisis, as their social and constitutional responsibilities to administer justice without delay brush up against their responsibilities to protect public health. And those courts that have reopened look and feel very different than they did six months ago.
国外免费加速器手机版 points out some of the changes that have been implemented in reopened state courthouses. They feel at once dramatic and mundane: requiring attorneys and clients to communicate only by passing notes through a plexiglass window, holding trials in convention centers (or even fairgrounds!), and asking attorneys and judges to hold sidebars by walkie-talkie (with white noise pumped into the courtroom to avoid others overhearing). And notwithstanding these changes, the general fear of COVID-19 exposure remains pervasive.
This is all deeply unsettling, yet there may be a silver lining. Although unwelcome, the pandemic is forcing an explosion of creativity in our institutions. Some of today’s courthouse solutions may be jettisoned as soon as it is safe to do so, but I also suspect that some will prove worthy of keeping around.
This morning brought the sad news that renowned trial lawyer Stephen Susman has passed away from the novel coronavirus. He was 79.
Steve was widely known for his remarkable trial skills, and as a founder of the Houston litigation firm Susman Godfrey. But his professional energy and interests extended far beyond the courtroom. He was deeply active in efforts to improve the civil justice system and to preserve the civil jury trial. A few years ago, he founded the Civil Jury Project at NYU Law School for that express purpose, bringing together lawyers, judges, jurors, and scholars to study and advocate for the importance of civil juries.
I first met Steve about ten years ago, at the Duke Conference of the federal Advisory Committee on Civil Rules. As judges and lawyers struggled to determine the best way to rein in discovery costs, Steve pointed out how much can be done when opposing counsel simply act like adults and professionals. As proof, he submitted a two-page checklist of discovery agreements that he claimed to use in every case. It was a straightforward and sensible list, agreed to by counsel in advance, covering issues like the order of depositions and the labeling of exhibits — the type of things that would naturally keep discovery within reasonable limits and avoid pointless cost to the client. My favorite item remains the very first on the list:
As to any discovery dispute, the lead lawyers will try to resolve [it] by phone and no one will write letters to the other, including letters attached as pdf’s to emails and phone calls.
The entire checklist was so simple, and yet so brilliant, that I immediately sought permission to share it with my law students. (Steve graciously granted that permission in short order.) I still assign the checklist to my law students as a paradigm example of how a lawyer can simultaneously be a zealous advocate of his client and a responsible officer of the court.
About three years ago, Steve asked me to join the Civil Jury Project as an academic advisor, an invitation for which I was both honored and grateful. It was a pleasure to see him in action, with his relentless energy and good cheer, as he brought together jurors and lawyers at “jury improvement luncheons” across the country, and held programs for scholars to share their insights into the jury system.
Our thoughts are with Steve’s family today. His passing is a profound loss for the entire legal community.
