Word: courtly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dressed in black robes, heralded into court by bailiffs crying "Hear ye! Hear ye! All rise!" and addressed as "Your Honor," judges are imposing, even intimidating. They are supposed to be: they have great power over people's lives, and increasingly, they...
This is so not only in the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to be the final arbiter of the law, but in courts all over the country. By reading their own views into broadly worded statutes and vaguely defined constitutional rights, judges have assumed?some say usurped?unaccustomed roles. Increasingly, judges, state and federal, can be found ordering government boards and agencies to obey the law. When the boards balk, as they often do, judges end up running school boards, welfare agencies, mental hospitals and prisons. Just last month, for instance, a Boston judge placed 67 public housing projects...
Within their courtrooms, judges are virtual autocrats. Many will not even talk to the press; thanks to last month's Supreme Court decision in Gannett vs. DePasquale, they are now closing off their courtrooms. Already, at least 39 judges have banned press or public or both from pretrial hearings or trials.* Lawyers, out of necessity, bow before the bench. "The job corrupts people," says Jack Frankel, executive officer of the California Commission on Judicial Performance. "The judge says, 'I'm going on vacation.' Everyone says, 'Fine, Judge.' The judge says, 'I'm coming in late.' Again, it's 'Fine, Judge...
Stories of judicial arrogance are commonplace. When a Japanese-American lawyer requested additional tune for a trial, a federal judge responded: "How much time did you give us at Pearl Harbor?" Former Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Noel Cannon, who painted her chambers pink, kept a pet Chihuahua by her side and was called the "Dragon Lady," once threatened to give a traffic officer "a vasectomy with a .38." While hearing a voting rights case brought by blacks in Alabama in the '60s, Federal Judge William Harold Cox exclaimed, "Who is telling these people that they can get in there...
Some sentences should vary, of course, according to the character and prior record of the defendant. The fact that shoplifters usually go to jail if they get caught in Charlotte, N.C., whereas they get probation in Albuquerque, may just reflect different local mores. As New York Criminal Court Judge Harold Rothwax says, "Communities have a right to view crime differently." Mandatory sentences set by the legislature, which several states use for at least some crimes, can be more heavy-handed than evenhanded. Such laws cannot distinguish, for instance, between someone who steals to feed his family and someone who steals...