- Quickdraw McLaw
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- Here’s an interesting interview featuring a California attorney who is representing victims of the October 1 shooting against MGM. [Baltimore Post-Examiner]
- Judge Ron Israel sentenced a man who killed three pedestrians while driving under the influence to 21 to 60 years in prison. [LasVegasNow]
- With a new AG, Nevada is taking a slightly different direction on the national front. [TNI]
Who are the Business Court judges currently?
Betsy, Williams, Allf, Denton and Delaney (overflow)
I am going to say something that I am not certain I have ever said on this Blog: Thank you.
I believe that at least two of those judges named had little to no experience as practitioners in these areas that they are now presiding over.
I understand that smart, hard-working competent judges can become skilled a in a subject matter that they had no real involvement in before they took the bench. Also, I am not aware of any significant carping in the legal community as far as any of these judges supposedly lacking the legal chops to preside over business litigation. So my observations have nothing specifically to do with any of them, and I presume(perhaps incorrectly) that they are all eventually now doing fine with the subject matter assigned to them.
With all those qualifiers in place, I am a purest in this sense and believe that, to the best extent possible, judges should be assigned to preside over subject matters they had fairly extensive experience with as a practitioner. Instead, judges who may have had little or no experience in business law, commercial litigation, or similar disciplines, have a serious learning curve, and learn on the bench to the possible real life detriment of the parties.
These business court matters often concern very complex, multi-layered matters with many moving parts. The concept of an attorney who practiced in the area for like 20 years being at the mercy of a judge recently appointed to business court, who had no experience in this area as a practitioner, is disturbing beyond measure.
But this is not just a problem in Business Court. In an apparently well-intentioned goal of having our judges be versatile, they are moved around with some regularity, often to courts where they do not yet know anything about the subject matter. As a result, we see career prosecutors, and career criminal defenses attorneys, assigned to preside over civil matters, while attorneys who solely practiced plaintiff's personal injury their whole career, and those who have served as insurance defense attorneys for their whole career, are inexplicably dumped in the deep end of the pool and assigned to criminal court.
Wanting judges to obtain some versatility, and increase their breadth of knowledge into other areas of law, sounds good on the surface. But acquiring a tiny bit of knowledge in an area can be a harmful thing and wind up causing more harm than good.
Instead, we should follow the model of some larger, established court systems of some major metropolitan areas. That model is try to assign the judge to the area which most clearly matches their skill set and knowledge set, and if they then perform adequately, leave them right where they are. That is a lot better than the farce of forcing them to gain a little bit of knowledge in some area they previously knew nothing about, and then dumping them in that new assignment full-time so they can really complicate people's lives.
In Nevada, I have seen people who were intelligent and skilled civil attorneys, who once on the bench are assigned to criminal court, and due to lacking some real feel for criminal constitutional protections(and probably also lacking a really good law clerk, and being too proud to ask skilled practitioners for help and guidance) issue some mind-numbing rulings that scream out for reversal. I have also seen excellent career criminal attorneys, form both sides of the aisle, become judges and immediately assigned to civil court, who have no real feel of the dynamics in the civil arena, and therefore issue some really head-scratching orders.
A million times this.
The problem with this analysis is that there are too many cases to go around to completely parcel people off into their former practice areas.
5:44. You are of course correct that there is no way to, even remotely,
accomplish the assignments as cleanly and completely as 2:32 suggests. There are simply going to be far too many cases in given areas, and not a sufficient number of judges who practiced primarily in that area while in practice, which means all those extra cases would still overflow to some judges who had little or no experience in those areas while in practice. Plus, there are, logistically speaking, a number of other challenges that would make this a very difficult plan to implement with anything approaching a large degree of accuracy.
However, I believe that if we dwell on the specifics of why such a model would be quite difficult to largely achieve, we might lose sight of the broader, and more important point, such post was trying to make.
Such point is that not only is there no attempt to match judges, at least vaguely, with their fields of experience from their practice, there in fact seems to be a concerted effort to do the complete opposite(under the pretext of making judges more versatile and well-rounded). The fact that this plan, as you accurately note, could never come close to be fully realized, is no excuse to compound problems to a far greater extent.
For example, if at least the simple and obvious are done, it could go a long way. If someone spent almost their entire practice in civil law, match them to a civil calendar. If they spent their whole career in the criminal realm, assign them a criminal calendar.
There are people who spent a good deal of their career working as a prosecutor, and then in the private realm as a criminal defense attorney, who have been viewed from both sides as being acceptable as they have worked for both sides, and are generally viewed as fair and well-centered. At lest take such an individual and put him/her in criminal calendar, as opposed to Business Court, or somewhere else they are ill-suited.
Has Judge Miley returned to the bench following her recent incident?
Who is administratively handling Department 6 with Cadish gone?