T0-WIT: THEN IT’S A DUCK
I was in no hurry to open the envelope because I really didn’t want to read the opinion inside. Call it a hunch, lawyer’s intuition if you will, but as Indiana Jones is fond of saying during his own moments of rising terror, I had a bad feeling about this.
The subject at hand was an unopposed change of name proceeding, as cut and dried a matter as there is in the law. My client had certainly met the nominal burden of proof required by statute, but instead of just simply signing the pro forma order I had prepared, something any knowledgeable and experienced judge would have done in a heartbeat, His Honor announced that this matter presented him with complex issues which required intense legal analysis and that he would accordingly have to ponder his decision.
As my understandably perturbed client and I stood while Judge exited the courtroom, I noticed he walked out holding his gavel in one hand while he repeatedly smacked the open palm of his other with its head; he was also foaming slightly at the mouth, and as I realized when I finally read the opinion such body gestures, perhaps alternatives to the more traditional and familiar form of digital gesticulation, were indeed infallible predictors of the result.
“I’m denying this petition,” His Honor had written, “because Petitioner’s current surname shines as a bright yellow star in tribute to his nationality. Changing it would be a grievous insult to both his Swiss heritage and his Swissy friends. Further, if God had intended this petitioner to have a different name He would have had him born to different parents.”
“Swiss heritage?” “Swissy friends?” Did His Honor hate the Swiss? Was he a closet Suissaphobe? Oddly enough my client isn’t Swiss, he comes from Alsace Lorraine but apparently for Judge that was close enough. His playing of the God card troubled me as well. Isn’t that sometimes the most common refuge of bigots?
There may however be another explanation. Judge has only recently been elected to the bench and did not come to it with a whole lot of lawyering experience. Perhaps its possible then that His Honor’s bizarre decision in this matter is simply a consequence of that lack.
In my search for comprehension, I reread the transcript of the hearing. “So help me out here,” His Honor had remarked to my client at its outset, “what’s its like to be from the land of cheese.”
“I wouldn’t know,” my client replied, “I’ve never been to Wisconsin.
At some later point in the hearing Judge remarked to my client “I’m not sure I understood correctly what you were just saying. Perhaps you could yodel it for me.” Something was starting to smell bad here.
Now every opinion gets unavoidably filtered through a Judge’s brain, and as the facts and the law appurtenant thereto wend their way through that process they are always raped by the mind. Sometimes that’s a good thing, sometimes it is not, but when the byproduct of that enigmatic ruckus breaks from reality one needs to take notice.
When the look, smell, walk and talk of things tell you a judge sees the world with vision so scarred that his condition and the human condition will never see eye to eye, what do you do? With little cases like this, the ones no one can afford to appeal, the ones driven more by pragmatism than principles, there isn’t much to be done. All you can do, the best you can do, is point and say “Duck!”
©2016, S. Sponte, Esq.