When looking for stories on personal injury law for this blog, I often come across comments bashing the jury system. So consider this: Would you want any of these judges sitting on your case:
- Judge Roy Pearson (D.C.), crying in court over his $54M pants;
- Elizabeth Halverson (Las Vegas), Ordering her staff to give her foot rubs, among other transgressions;
- Judge Larry Seidlin (Florida) – crying in the Anna Nicole Smith baby case;
- Judge Lance Ito – Who turned the O.J. Simpson case into a three-ring circcus
And they are not alone. Others get “selected” from time-to-time for their “jurisprudence:”
Readers Digest: America’s Worst Judges;
Overlawyered: Worst Judges, cont’d.;
The Legal Reader: Memphis Judge Banned From Florida Resort For Harassment;
And these links don’t even involve scandal of the bribery or bench-buying kind, as we’ve seen in Brooklyn, or those with political biases judges might bring to the bench.
The point, however, is not to bash judges in general. Not even close, since most I’ve seen are hard-working and conscientious (and I have to appear in front of them). But rather, to highlight that just as there may be bad jurors from time-to-time, so too are there bad judges. Humans are fallible.
When the nations founders enshrined the right to trial by jury, even in civil cases, they knew what they were doing.