THE ROBING ROOM

Although I have only examined Magistrate Watanabe's work product in one case (not my own!), it was so atrocious as to cast aspersions on his character, scholarship, or both. Judicial misconduct is like a bear in the woods: while you might not always see him, when you find his paw-print in the mud, you know he’s out there. While few litigants can ever expect to see a wad of bills being slipped under a robe, or the kind of judicial “favor-trading” described by Prof. Dershowitz, the paw-prints -- irrational decisions, in irreconcilable conflict with precedent -- are generally unmistakable. Professor Karl Llewellyn bluntly observed that dishonest judges routinely engage in manhandling ... the facts of the pending case, or of the precedent, so as to make it falsely appear that the case in hand falls under a rule which in fact it does not fit, or especially that it falls outside of a rule which would lead in the instant case to a conclusion the court cannot stomach. [Karl Llewellyn, The Common Law Tradition: Deciding Appeals (1960) at 133.