This summer, I am making a weekly visit to local courthouses to observe trials and hearings. I recommend it to all law students. Sitting in court, it strikes me as more than a little ludicrous that I've completed 2 yrs of law school and no one's taken me to see what's going on here. Shouldn't this be, like, a mandatory field trip during the first month of lawyering skills?
Some tips.
• It's ok to go in & out of courtrooms while court is in session. Do it quietly. And if the judge says "all rise", you stand up too.
• If you go to federal court, leave your cell phone in the car – they won't let in any device with a camera or recording capability.
• Judges do post their calendars online. But these are pretty useless, since lawyers are calling up all the time and removing their hearings (because they settled the case, or resolved the issue themselves). The best thing to do is just show up and cruise around, looking for a court in session.
• You'll notice when you do this that most courtrooms on any given day are dark. That surprised me a little. Where is this massive judicial backlog I keep hearing about? But, that doesn't mean judges & their clerks aren't busy in chambers, reading turgid motions to compel discovery, etc. The upshot is, if you have a favorite judge, don't count on being able to watch them in action.
• You will notice that many lawyers just aren't that good. Many juries look very bored. And you will get to see judges opening up the whup-ass on misbehaving attorneys. That's a gas.
• You will also notice that a judge's main job is not really to judge, per se. It's to conserve judicial resources by pushing work back onto the attorneys – in a way, to avoid judging. Each judge has hundreds of cases on their docket. It's just not efficient to treat each one like a special unique flower. Trial, you come to appreciate, is a massive time-waster because it makes the judge unavailable to do anything else. You will see judges berate attorneys for bringing in issues that should've been solved outside of court.
• The Spring St federal building is like a courthouse from the movies. Though the statue of a hunky, topless young Abe Lincoln in the lobby is just a tad more creepy homoeroticism than I was looking for on my way in. By contrast, the Commonwealth Ave state court building is pure Nixon / Soviet era architectural depression.
• I've walked into no fewer than 4 police misconduct trials against the LAPD. Nice to know some things don't change.
21 Jun 06
wow....fed court down there sounds even worse than it is here
there is literally nothing going on four days out of the week
Posted by: azulskies at June 21, 2006 04:41 PMthere definitely are some schlockhouses that pass for courts in LA but the worst one that I ever had the pleasure of going to was metro-south. It's a county superior court that at the time specialized in family and civil cases (the really depressing stuff). The building defies description besides to say that it is a windowless monolith with no exterior features. "oh my god" is usually the first thing out of people's mouth when they see it. It's right next to Trade Tech on Washington Blvd (I think the cross street is Hill). If you're working downtown and take the 10 home its three blocks past the onramp - worth a look but a bit unsafe at night.
Posted by: tonyryan at June 21, 2006 09:53 PMWhat's so creepy about homoeroticism?
Posted by: at June 21, 2006 09:56 PMHey, I appreciate federally-funded, non-creepy homoeroticism as much as anyone. But it's freakin' ABE LINCOLN, stripped to his low-slung trousers, his smooth, muscular chest exposed.
I couldn't take a picture because they don't allow phones. Am I the only one who's noticed this? Surely not.
Posted by: MB at June 21, 2006 10:26 PM