Don’t Hold Your Breath

I don’t read blogs any more. Can’t make myself do it. As far as I know, the Blogosphere has been dead for a long time, and my interests have changed, so I have less in common with people I used to exchange links with.

Today I made an exception. I checked sites on my blogroll to see if I should continue linking to them. Anyone still blogging in 2018 makes the list. If you are dead, you probably make the list. Other than that, it’s a case-by-case thing.

By the way, Steven den Beste died in 2016. Just found that out. Sad. He was always nice to me.

I took a look at Ed Bonderenka’s blog, where I saw a humorous meme about Ruth Ginsburg’s decline, and I got to wondering if people understand something: it does not matter if RBG loses her mind.

Believe it or not, a federal judge doesn’t need to be mentally competent to remain in office. If you can breathe, walk, and sit up straight, and you don’t throw fits or anything, you can be a Supreme Court justice.

Judges of all types are very lazy, and many are also overburdened. As a result, we have a system in which the taxpayers support squads of lawyers who do the actual work. These people are known as clerks.

It’s a big honor to clerk for a federal judge, and the pay is okay, although the big draw is the career boost, not the money. A friend of mine pulled $50K down, with federal benefits and short, short federal hours, right out of law school. That was at the district court, or lowest, level. She offered to recommend me for the job when she quit, but I was not interested. I think it would have been fun, because working as a judge is like doing crossword puzzles all day. It’s stimulating mental exercise, by law standards. Also, a court clerk has zero responsibility compared to a real attorney. You can’t be sued for malpractice when you clerk. That’s nice. But I was a real lawyer, and I expected to continue building a lucrative career. I couldn’t see settling for $50K per year for several years, while abandoning the juicy job I had, working with my own father and his partners.

I have never been interested in glory. I went to law school so I could make money. I didn’t give a crap about the law review, the silly honor societies, clerkships, or awards. I still think that stuff is for insecure people who have a grossly inflated notion of the nobility of what is actually a fairly grubby profession. If you were an Eagle Scout or a participant in Junior Achievement, or if your dad was a janitor and you can’t believe you have a real college diploma, a clerkship is for you.

I can’t find it in myself to be impressed by lawyers. When I was in grad school, I rode elevators in the math and physics building with Nobelists and near-Nobelists. After that, I went to law school, where anyone who chases ambulances successfully is treated like a god. Once your IQ hits maybe 145, you have reached a point where you can do an excellent job with any task the law offers. If your IQ is 180, it won’t make you a better lawyer. You will just be a very good lawyer who is bored.

I worked hard during my first semester, and a nutty professor killed my shot at being invited to join the law review. After that, I resolved not to work. I used to tell people you can work 80 hours a week and get A’s, or you can work for three days at the end of the semester and get a B.

When I was an undergrad, I took mostly math and physics courses. Homework for my liberal arts courses took a couple of hours per week to knock off. My math work, which most people probably would have considered very hard, probably took six hours per week. I would guess physics took four hours per day, minimum. If you got a liberal arts degree, and then you went to law school, you may think you accomplished something. I’m sorry to tell you, but you were always in the shallow end with the toddlers.

When I was in law school, I eventually quit taking notes. I sat in class and wrote a few things in order to look like I was doing something, but basically, I quit…taking…notes. It wasn’t necessary. I used to play video games in class. I wore out my laptop, playing a Beavis and Butt-head game in Ethics, and I got an A.

The game was very silly. Toilets would fly through the air, and I would hit keys in order to shoot them down. I’m not kidding. This is what I did.

Sorry, lawyers. Your job just isn’t that challenging.

The people who graduate first in their law school classes, and the people who end up on the Supreme Court, are not geniuses. They are just good students. There’s a difference. My dad was third in his class, and he was a phenomenal lawyer, and I’ve always been a lot smarter than he is.

Anyway, clerking was not for me.

When a federal judge gets a case, he turns his clerks loose on it. They read the things attorneys file. They do the judge’s legal research for him. They even write opinions. Of course, this isn’t 100% true. I’m sure some judges do more than read and stamp the work of clerks, but if you think a judge’s name at the end of an opinion means he wrote it or is even highly familiar with the case, you’re dreaming. He may have done the work, and he may not.

Federal judges, often, are neither bright nor competent. They are probably, on average, not as sharp as their clerks, who have to demonstrate their ability in order to get their jobs. Federal judges get their appointments for political reasons. It’s not about merit. They don’t read filings. They don’t understand the law. They don’t understand the facts. When they rule correctly, it’s always somewhat surprising, and often it’s for the wrong reasons.

I guess the last paragraph was tangential. I get frustrated when I think of the things I’ve seen judges do. I’m not just complaining about the times I lost, either. I got a case dismissed by judges who let me pull the wool over their eyes. I made arguments I knew were vulnerable to attack, and the judges and opposing counsel were too dumb to do their homework, so I won.

So sorry. Better luck next time. I’m not going to help a judge who’s not intelligent enough to see why he should rule for my opponent. Unlike a judgeship, the lawyering business is a meritocracy, and the fittest win.

If I had been the judge or my opponent, things would have turned out differently. They disgraced themselves and proved their incompetence by letting me win.

I knew how to get the case dismissed. I knew how to prevent it from being dismissed. I knew how to win it, if I were in my opponent’s shoes. Fortunately, I was the only one who knew these things.

This is how you tell good lawyers from bad. Take the same case. Give it to two lawyers. See who wins. Turn it around and make them argue the other sides. Who wins now? Same guy; trust me. Unless one side is completely hopeless.

Now you know why O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

My dad used to say this to me: “Don’t complain about other people’s incompetence. That’s your competition.”

If you think lawyers are generally smart, you have been fooled. Most are only fit for simple fields like criminal and family law. Maybe they can write wills and deeds. If you made them litigate, they would drown immediately. I believe a lot of people end up working as judges because they can’t make it as litigators.

That’s also where law professors come from, but for a different reason. They have no guts. If you got A’s in law school, but the thought of appearing at a hearing or wondering where you’ll get your next paycheck makes you vomit blood, you’re probably going to be a professor some day. Professors want to nestle in their cribs and be taken care of.

Here’s something judges will hate reading: a big part of a lawyer’s job is to tell a judge what to think and say. The judge rolls in at 11 a.m., looks at filings he can’t understand, scratches his head, and wonders what to do. You take advantage of that by spelling out the law very, very clearly. You convince the judge that all he has to do is repeat what you say and rule in your favor. That’s really what lawyers do. We even draft orders for judges and include them with our filings. Sign it, stamp it, and you’re off to lunch, and no one realizes you have no idea what you’re doing.

I’ll tell you a funny true story. My uncle was a judge. He was not a great judge, but he was a great guy. He went to a judge conference. There was a seminar about ruling on objections. One of the judges admitted he used a deck of cards. He drew cards. Red card…sustained. Black card…overruled. The other judges were aghast.

During the seminar, they saw how this guy ruled when he actually tried to apply the law.

They told him to keep using the cards.

Not my story. My uncle’s.

Stuffy lawyers who perpetuate the myth of the nobility of the law can’t stand reading things like that. “HARUMPH! HARUMPH! You, sir, are no officer of the court! You have no respect for our august chambers!” These are the same guys who get drunk every Friday at 4 p.m. and hit on their paralegals. Same guys who make fools of themselves in bars every weekend. It’s all a sham. I wonder how many lines of coke have been done prior to hearings in courthouse bathrooms, by phonies who loved to talk about the dignity of the law.

Back to the topic. RBG doesn’t have to do much. She can assign things to clerks and wait for the results. I don’t know, but it’s reasonable to think she can even assign the task of assigning tasks to clerks…to clerks. She has to show up for work, sit in hearings, and basically, not expire.

Some conservatives are itching to see her step down because of incompetence. They say chemotherapy wrecked her brain, which may well be true. It does that. I’ve seen it. Doesn’t matter. Her leftist clerks will sleep in her house, feed her, bathe her, dress her, and carry her to work in a shopping bag, if that’s what it takes to prevent Donald Trump from nominating a third justice. If Scalia had become demented under Obama, his clerks would have done the same thing for him.

A justice isn’t an individual. A justice is an association. RBG consists of one elderly woman and a crew of underlings. The head doesn’t have to be completely functional in order for the body to go on living.

In order for RBG to go away based on disability, she will have to be such a mess there is no way to prevent her continued employment from turning into the theater of the absurd. She will have to say crazy things in front of the public, or she will have to be so demented she can’t be managed. Short of things like that, she will be on the bench as long as she can fog a mirror.