As goes the Supreme Court ....

In 1971, a jury in New York City was split 11 to 1 in favor of a robbery conviction, but the case was dismissed by the judge after only 12 hours of deliberation because he had another engagement. This enabled the robber to escape punishment because a second trial would have violated his constitutional rights. What was the other engagement? A trip to Europe.

I can imagine many of my readers saying, "That New York case was in 1971. Maybe the judge didn't consider his duties to be pressing, but haven't things changed since then? Aren't the courts now overworked?"

The answer is that a few big-city criminal courts did become clogged with drug cases in the '70s and '80s. And in civil courts around the country there was a substantial increase in the number of suits filed. But on the whole, most judges manage to continue to lead a soft life by minimizing the number of cases that are actually tried or heard on appeal.

On May 9, 1989, Manhattan Lawyer sent reporters into all 45 full-time courtrooms of the New York State Supreme Court felony division. They found that the average court was in session only four hours and 27 minutes a day. Sixty-two percent spent fewer than five hours in session.; 42 percent started work after 10 a.m.. None was in session more than six hours and 35 minutes.

In Massachusetts, judges get six weeks' vacation a year in addition to sick leave, a week off for "personal" time, and three weeks' "educational" leave. Still they claim they are overworked. So in 1990, the Boston Globe looked into when these judges actually left the courthouse. Six judges were photographed making their exits. The exact times of departure were 3:33 p.m., 3:20 p.m., 2:35 p.m., 12:05 p.m., 12:01 p.m., and 11:10 a.m. One judge was described by the Globe as "leaving a courtroom so silent and empty that his court officer was able to lie down on a bench and nap the afternoon away."

Perhaps, you say, the judges were rushing home to write opinions in the privacy of their dens. Not very likely, since most of the judges covered in the Globe and Manhattan Lawyer stories were below the level where opinion writing is the main part of the job. Where opinion writing is central to the job, at the appellate level, we see the same relaxed approach that Manhattan Lawyer and the Boston Globe found in the lower courts. In 1989, the Recorder, a San Francisco legal newspaper, conducted a study of how long on average it took judges of the Ninth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals to produce opinion. The four hardest-working jurists took fewer than 100 days. But the average for all the judges was 147 days. Seven took more than 200. one 307.