On the Record

We don’t typically give birthday shout-outs in this space, but I think one is deserved for a man who has done more to expose Americans to the legal system than perhaps anyone else alive.

I am, of course, referring to Judge Joseph A. Wapner - aka Judge Wapner of “The People’s Court” - who turned 90 on Sunday (although you couldn’t tell it from the photos). To celebrate, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and returned to television to preside over one more case in “The People’s Court.”

You can watch Wapner’s cameo here and here. Yes, the music remains the same, and yes, Judge Wapner nails it, as always.

Somewhere, Raymond Babbitt is smiling.

Happy Monday!

• Gregory Kane weighs in on alleged child-killer Dante Parrish, whom the Maryland Innocence Project helped free last year in an unrelated case. In other Parrish news, Peter Hermann’s a got a letter from the teacher of Parrish’s alleged victim. (HT on the letter: Baltimore Crime.)
• John Allen Muhammad’s stand-by lawyer, Baltimore’s J. Wyndal Gordon will write a book about the case.
• Is the Obama administration taking its time on judicial nominees?
• The Lakota Sioux are suing to get authorities to prosecute the guy whose sweat lodge self-help ceremony allegedly killed three people.
• I don’t know, I sorta like this law firm ad.

On Saturday, I spent a rejuvenating morning serving as a judge for the semi-final round of a moot-court competition hosted by American University’s Washington College of Law.

My service to the Burton D. Wechsler First Amendment Moot Court Competition stirred me in three ways:

1. It made me feel 20 years younger, when I nervously stood as a law student waiting to be grilled by “judges” at the same school;

2. It enabled me to step out of the role of spectator (I have reported on oral arguments for two decades) and participate in the enterprise; and

3. As a husband — and father of a teen and a tween — it was refreshing to have people listen to me and answer my questions.

It also didn’t hurt that the fact pattern and issue were right up my alley.

The head of research and development at a major high-tech company was suing for libel a blogger who had accused him online of running a Mumbaian sweatshop where child laborers built computer components.

The issue before the moot court was whether the company executive qualified as a “public figure” or “private person” under the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence, a critical distinction that largely determines who wins the case.

Public figures, to prove libel, have the heavy burden of showing that the reporter wrote an erroneous story either knowing it was false or with a reckless disregard for the truth.  Private individuals need only show that the journalist was negligent in reporting a story that was  untrue.

The three-judge panel on which I served — as “chief” no less — ruled for the reporter. Imagine that.

The two law school students picked the right hearing for their assignment in a civil procedures class.

Judge Ruth Ann Jakubowski ruled on 21 motions in one case Tuesday morning in Baltimore County Circuit Court, according to court records. I had to refer to court records even though I was in the courtroom because I lost count during the two-hour hearing.

The case, Alatortsev v. H& J Motors Inc. et al, drew my attention because it was one man against eight defendants, including several BMW dealerships. I was all prepared to write a humorous blog post about all those defense lawyers playing musical chairs at the defense table to be heard. (I felt especially bad for the court reporter, who could have used name tags to keep track of everyone.)

But then the hearing began, and it wasn’t quite as funny. The case has consumed seven volumes since Vadim Alatortsev filed his complaint in August 2008. From what I gathered, he alleges there were multiple problems with a used BMW he purchased in late 2007.

Alatortsev cited COMAR several times, held up reams of paper and said he “always reads the small print,” but apparently he wasn’t clear on the rules of procedure and discovery.

Judge Jakubowski denied all 11 of the plaintiff’s motions, which ranged from requesting a court-appointed forensic scientist to review allegedly forged paperwork to seeking a protective order to prevent the defense from obtaining personal information about Alatortsev and his wife through discovery.

“Once you file a lawsuit, you become an open book,” said Jakubowski, who, as chairwoman of the Maryland State Bar Association’s Judicial Administration Council, is developing guidelines for attorneys facing self-represented litigants.

Jakubowski also denied Alatortsev’s motions to sanction the defense lawyers for their actions, explaining that the lawyers are simply doing their jobs. She ordered Alatortsev to allow the defense experts to examine his car, and ordered him and his wife to sit for depositions within the next 45 days.

“At some point in time, with the pleadings in this case, you’re going to subject yourself to attorneys’ fees or the case’s dismissal,” Jakubowski said. (One of the defense laywers indicated in court that he would seek attorneys’ fees from Alatortsev.)

The whole hearing got me thinking – is this an extreme case of the perils of self-representation? Or is this more common than I think? If you don’t want to leave a public comment, please e-mail me.

Happy Monday! Here are a few law links to start your week off:

•  U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein probably isn’t going anywhere, MainJustice.com says. The prediction comes in an article about how a third of the country’s U.S. Attorney’s offices are still run by Bush-appointed prosecutors.
• Page Croyder applauds The Sun for coming down hard on Pat Jessamy’s office.
• Slate reports that female judges tend to be less qualified than male judges by traditional measures (they went to lower-ranked colleges and law schools, had less prestigious clerkships and spent less time in private practice) but are just as good at actually judging.
• Happy opening day of the SCOTUS term! Sandra Day O’Connor says she’s “disappointed” at the changes in the court and feels some of her decisions “are being dismantled.”
• It’s unclear where this video, “The Streetwalking Lawyers of Aurora Avenue,” comes from, and it appears to be old, but it’s new to me and very funny.

Sorry, University of Maryland and University of Baltimore law school students – you don’t have a shot of clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

An ABA Journal story about the composition of current and past clerks at the highest court in the land quotes Scalia telling an American University Washington College of Law student earlier this year she should look elsewhere for a clerkship: 

By and large, I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?

(The real chutzpah of the quote is that Scalia said it on AU’s campus after being invited by the law school.)

For this upcoming term, the Harvards and Yales of the world still dominate the clerkships, although Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “caused a stir” by picking a Seton Hall alumnus as his one of his clerks, according to the story. The universities of Georgia and Texas and George Washington University are also represented this term.

One former justice who didn’t automatically gravitate to top-10 law schools was Byron White, who hired ”interesting people,” including a man who worked in a coal mine.

“Look, there are a hundred people a year that could to the job adequately,” the NFL-player-turned-justice told biographer Dennis Hutchinson. “I might as well have someone who’s interesting, and that doesn’t mean the ones that the fancy law profes­sors recommend.”

A vote on U.S. District Judge Andre M. Davis’ nomination to the 4th Circuit could be scheduled as soon as next week, according to The Baltimore Sun’s Maryland Politics blog.

Since taking office, President Obama has made 17 Article III appointments to the federal judiciary. So far the full Senate has approved just one: Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who heard her first case on Wednesday.

Sorry, still no word on when DLLR Secretary Tom Perez might be able to follow his staff to the Justice Department.

Happy start-of-a-four-day-week! Here are some law links to start your Tuesday:

• The following sentence should give readers a pretty good idea of the result of his most recent trial, John Bratt writes: “I just finished a two-day jury trial in the Circuit Court for Cecil County.”
• A Baltimore man imprisoned for armed robbery was pardoned years ago but can’t get his conviction expunged, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project writes.
• How long do you give it before these T-shirts are considered fashionable? Hey, at least this Ohio judge is making his statement without using duct tape. HT: Above the Law.
• Don’t groan when you get up, don’t call women “gals,” and other advice for the older job-seeker.
• “Power of attorney” does not equal attorney.

Female lawyers whose first names sound masculine or gender-ambiguous have a better chance of getting named to the bench in South Carolina than lawyers with typically female names,  a pair of economists argue. According to a post about the study over at ABA Journal:

The study finds that changing a woman’s name from something feminine, such as Sue, to a gender-ambiguous name such as Kelly increased the odds of becoming a South Carolina judge by about 5 percent, the Vancouver Sun reports. Changing the name Sue to a predominantly male name such as Cameron tripled the odds of becoming a judge, and changing it to Bruce increased the odds by a factor of five.

…

“When we see a masculine name, something in our subconscious is cued,” said one of the study authors, economics professor Bentley Coffey of Clemson University in South Carolina. “There seems to be a subtle sexist notion, even if it’s not gender discrimination per se,” he told the Vancouver Sun.

My own unscientific and cursory examination of Maryland’s circuit and district court benches reveals that whatever the case in South Carolina, Maryland has very few female judges with male or ambiguous names.

While South Carolina has female judges named Bruce, Barney, Dale and Cameron, I found no equivalent male names for female judges on our district court or on the circuit courts of the most populous counties. (There is the possibility that there are female judges with names so masculine that I didn’t even think to look up their gender, but I’d think that if Maryland had female judges named Charles or Robert, I would’ve heard of them.)

There are a few female judges with names that two generations ago might have been male, like Evelyn, Lynn and Gale, but are rarely seen on men these days. There are also female judges with slightly ambiguous names like Dana, Jamey and Halee, but if push came to shove and I were asked to guess the gender of these judges, I’d assume female, down the line. (My apologies to this recently retired male judge.)

Here are my theories on what’s going on:

1. The South Carolina study was very small. The effect might disappear if judge names were analyzed on a larger scale.

2. South Carolina voters/governors/judge-appointing bodies are more sexist than their Maryland counterparts.

But honestly? More than anything, it’s probably just that:

3. South Carolinians give their baby daughters really weird names.

An Ohio judge had a bailiff duct-tape the mouth of a defendant he thought was being too argumentative, reports the Canton Repository. From the story:

It was the first time in 12 years on the bench that Belden has ordered a defendant’s mouth to be taped. He said he learned of the technique from an out-of-state judge while they were attending a training seminar.

Here’s hoping that judge wasn’t from Maryland. I’d have to think this judge has earned himself a call from Ohio’s equivalent of the Judicial Disabilities Commission. I wonder if some sort of appellate reversal might be in the cards as well.

HT: ABA Journal.