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Friday, August 08, 2008

Courts - "For 'Maverick' Federal Judges, Life Tenure Is Largely Unfettered License"

This freely-available opinion piece today in the WSJ, written by Nathan Koppel, is aimed at federal judges, and particularly at a single federal district court judge, 84-year-old LA Judge Manuel Real:

Life tenure for federal judges aims to give them the independence to do what is right -- not protect them while doing wrong.

A string of recent transgressions by a federal judge in Los Angeles has some questioning whether the federal bench can adequately police itself.

In the most recent incident, the U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., last week ordered Judge Manuel Real to be removed from a patent-infringement case against Microsoft Corp. The appellate court said Judge Real, who ruled for Microsoft, improperly ignored evidence and failed to adequately state the reasoning behind his rulings. Trial judges are often reversed on appeal, but rarely found so lacking that they are removed from cases.

The very people charged with meting out carefully measured punishments are themselves subject to imprecise sanctions that are either too lax, according to some critics, or too severe to be used except in the rarest occasions. The U.S. Constitution allows judges to serve "during good behavior," which traditionally has been interpreted as "for life." The U.S. House of Representatives can impeach judges for "high crimes and misdemeanors," but only 13 judges have ever met this fate.

Defenders of the federal bench say the vast majority of federal judges are exemplary, in part because they are free to follow their consciences without worrying about losing their jobs. After all, federal judges, as one attorney noted, led the way in desegregating the South.

But the concerns come at a time when there are more serious-misconduct investigations of federal judges than at any time in recent years. Discipline short of impeachment, which typically results in a reprimand, is usually left to court-governing bodies, whose most severe penalty is to require misbehaving judges to take paid leaves of absence.

"How many people in America hold jobs where, if you do them badly enough, the punishment is you have to stop working and collect your pay?" says Charles Geyh, a professor at the Indiana University School of Law, who specializes in judicial ethics. Public shaming is a sufficient sanction for most judges, he says, but probably not for "the maverick judge who doesn't give a damn."

Noteworthly is this section, on state court judges:
In state courts, judges can be voted out of office or removed by state supreme courts for misconduct. State judges are also subject to mandatory codes of conduct, unlike their federal counterparts, who operate under advisory conduct codes that can be loosely interpreted.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 8, 2008 11:12 AM
Posted to Courts in general