Judicial partiality

How exactly do you get judges to be impartial?

Impartiality is supposed to be part of the job description but, somehow, these days it doesn’t seem that way. There’s no point in judge shopping if the judicial merchandise is fungible.

Of course, it should be fungible (and not just because fun is part of the word). Justice is justice. End of story.

The Atlantic recently ran a piece about “the judges who serve at Trump’s pleasure” that explained how a court system can go wrong if judges don’t get lifetime appointments – and how a court system can go wrong if they do get lifetime appointments.

I’m not sure what the point of the article was except to depress us.

My first thought was that we should get humans out of the judging business. Just throw evidence and arguments at artificial intelligence and hope for the best.

But AI can hallucinate and completely misunderstand humans and even programming can be political. If you fixed those problems, the power needed to run computer courts would be enormous. The court system would drain the grid.

And what if you want to appeal an AI’s ruling? Isn’t there a conflict of interest if the appellate court is AI too?

So AI isn’t a good solution. At least not yet.

Electing judges doesn’t work. That makes them even more political and, often, a whole lot less qualified.

What’s left?

The answer is a method courts already use: voir dire.

No, I don’t mean leave everything up to juries. That’s a possibility, I guess, but then all of us would be on jury duty forever. We’d need to increase immigration to keep up.

No, I mean voir dire judges. Ban forum shopping (even during holiday or Prime season) and instead line up a bunch of randomly captured judges for lawyers to grill about their biases. Nothing goes to trial until both sides are happy with the judge selection.

We may never have another political case go to trial again.

Recent examples. I bring this stuff up because politics — or at least claims about politics — seem to be trickling into everything whether they belong there or not.

Just last week, a federal judge in Texas reportedly ordered both Boeing and the U.S. Department of Justice to explain how diversity and exclusion policies had an effect on a plea deal that didn’t seem to have anything to with diversity and exclusion.

On the same day, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in Los Angeles on behalf of Space Exploration Technologies Corp. that claimed that the California Coastal Commission “engaged in naked political discrimination.”

Are you imagining commission members without their clothes on?’

Stop that.

Hmm. On the other hand, if all parties in litigation had to be naked in court, maybe there’d be an incentive to settle to get the heck out of there.

I apologize. A few weeks ago I told you to expect a review of California Representative Katie Porter’s recipes. This will not happen because the recipes seem like way too much work and I’m not entirely convinced I want to eat the results.

Ok, I’m a lazy food snob, but, in my defense, my spouse rejected them out of hand too and some of the ingredient lists weren’t exactly inspiring.

The Frito Pie included three kinds of beans and two packages of Fritos.

The No Guilt Gingerbread Cake included a half teaspoon of “ground gloves.” I’m hoping that’s a typo.

The Cheddar Biscuits did sound good but I strongly question the instruction to top them with dried parsley.

If any of this sounds irresistible to you, you can donate to Porter’s Truth to Power group.