Word: courtly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rico, have created commissions to discipline judges for wrongdoing. A few of these commissions are effective: since 1975, the New York commission has removed ten judges, censured 65, suspended four, and 73 have resigned. California is now witnessing the unique spectacle of a public investigation of the state supreme court. At issue is whether some members of the court delayed announcing politically controversial decisions before an election in order to save Chief Justice Rose Bird from being ousted by the voters; so far the inquiry has shown less evidence of conspiracy than pettiness and distrust among the court's seven...
...know much about the candidates for whom they are voting. A Texas poll in 1976 found that only 2% could even remember the names of the county judges on the ballot. A campaign for office is an inexact gauge of how a judge will behave if elected. New York Court of Appeals Judge Sol Wachtler made a TV commercial showing him, dressed in his robes, slamming shut a jail door. This tough-on-crime approach was good politics, but voters favoring a law-and-order man were probably disappointed. Wachtler turned out to be, if anything, defense-minded...
...reflect the population's. When he took office, only 1% were female and only 5% were black or Hispanic. So far, a third of his appointments are women or members of a minority group, or both, like Amalya Kearse, 42, a black woman. She will sit on a U.S. Court of Appeals in New York, after the U.S. Supreme Court perhaps the most powerful bench in the country. One thing that has not changed: 95% of Carter's appointments are Democrats, just as 92% of Nixon's appointees were Republicans...
Other potential candidates see a federal judgeship less as a prestigious and challenging job than as very hard work for low pay. Senator Charles Percy has privately remarked that he has had to offer, the job to ten people just to get one. Says U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Edward Allen Tamm: "Federal judges are working harder than they ever did in private practice, but they never get their heads above water." Worn down by the work load, comparing their salaries ($54,500 to $57,500) with the six-figure incomes of really successful lawyers, a discouraging number of federal...
...chief judge of a federal district court whose jurisdiction includes Los Angeles and 11 million people, Hill could hardly be in a better position to "vindicate" (a favorite word) individual rights. The great expansion of the "due process" and "equal protection" guarantees under the 14th Amendment over the past two decades has taken place largely in the federal courts, and it is to the federal district courts that people come first to assert their constitutional rights. Hill has struck down a California law barring aliens from certain public jobs, and is especially proud of his decision holding that to deny...