Despite Exposés Hundreds of Judges Preside in New York Without Law Degrees | Hacker News Reader

Despite Exposés Hundreds of Judges Preside in New York Without Law Degrees

propublica.org

I know it's at least partially caused by the fact that it's not news when something good is happening, but it often seems to me there's more going wrong in this country than going right:

Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many — truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers — have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school.

But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse.

The examination found overwhelming evidence that decade after decade and up to this day, people have often been denied fundamental legal rights. Defendants have been jailed illegally. Others have been subjected to racial and sexual bigotry so explicit it seems to come from some other place and time. People have been denied the right to a trial, an impartial judge and the presumption of innocence...

Certain media outlets only purpose is to make you feel specific things to bring about change, namely certain rights protected by the Constitution, by wearing you down to the point you'll give in to their ideology.

If I report every day about grisly bears hacking Subway sandwich shops, you'll soon be shouting won't somebody do something about this? Yes, someone will step forward and take care of that nasty propaganda ... uhhh .. I mean problem (even though its not a real threat).

In what way will a law degree prevent the following (quoted from the article):

he engaged in repeated, undignified and discourteous conduct toward a woman with whom he had been involved romantically

it was revealed that he’d been accepting his six-figure salary despite never reporting to work for several years because of a health issue

Corruption is corruption. Don't need schooling for that.

Some states require judges to be in good standing with the Bar. The NY state Bar's rules of professional conduct list is exhaustive.

http://www.nycourts.gov/rules/jointappellate/ny-rules-prof-c...

There is in general no requirement for judges to have a law degree. Indeed, it's not required for lawyers in states that still have apprenciteships (Virginia , Vermont, Washington, California). New York doesn't require a law degree either, though it does require one year of law school in addition to apprenticeship. Indeed, for most of the history of the republic, no formal education has been required to be a lawyer.

It's not required to have gone to law school or have passed the bar to be on the supreme court either.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/faq.aspx#faqgi2

As it should be, if this was the case a number of private institutions would have the ability to decide who gets to be on the supreme court or not.

If possible, can you go into more depth on how these apprenticeships work? I haven't really heard of many people doing them, which doesn't necessarily mean anything since I'm not in the legal field, but are they generally well regarded by other lawyers? I assume it's more difficult to find work as a lawyer without a law degree. Will the large prestigious firms hire someone like this? And are there any advantages of doing an apprenticeship vs law school?

They're a continuation of how legal education used to work before the formalization of schooling. You spend 3-6 years studying in a law office, then take the bar exam.

Unfortunately, due to schooling disease, it's very difficult to get a job this way. This is not so much a comment on the education, but a question of filtering. When a firm can fill its needs with Stanford Law grads, there is no need to look into statistically weaker candidate pools.

Unless you end up in court winning a prolific case for your client and only having ended up in such a place on the back of an apprenticeship. Brilliance is brilliance after all. So even if you're from a statistically weaker candidate pool, there are ways into large firms. It's entirely possible to make a name for yourself without being from a large firm. All you have to do is be good. Show up in court. Win cases. (Assuming of course you already passed the bar)

You don't have to go through school to be brilliant, you just won't be able to easily follow the same path as law school grads.

So?

Lay judges (that is, with no legal qualifications), known as justices of the peace or magistrates, are the norm in the lowest level of courts in England and Wales (and, with some differences, in Scotland). They receive training and are always assisted by a legally qualified clerk to advise on points of law and to make sure that proper procedures are observed. In England and Wales they always sit as a bench of three; in Scotland, it's more common for them to sit alone.

A few states of the US still have justices of the peace. A relative who is a lawyer says that the old joke was that "JP" stood for "judgment for the prosecution".

This is mindblowing because I'd always assumed that judges everywhere started as experienced lawyers. For contrast, I checked the Canadian judicial system and judges at all levels of court must be lawyers with at least five years experience. In practice, it turns out that most have 10+ years at time of appointment[1].

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/choosing-judges-in-canada-1.86...

I think the idea that only certified experts are allowed to do certain functions of government is a very dangerous idea. That quickly leads to aristocracy and away from democracy. You are basically saying that unless you have a particular certificate, a branch of government is closed to you.

That is why one of the most important things we should be teaching in our schools are the liberal arts especially logic and rhetoric.

Ideally every citizen should be able to take relevant information and apply it to the problem at hand. We already do this with judges. We don't require them to be a programmer to judge a software patent case, or a physician to preside over a medical maplpractice case. In the same way, there is no reason why a non-lawyer judge assisted by trained law clerks could not determine the relevant law and apply it to the case at hand. Indeed, in the future, machine learning will make the clerk's job even less relevant and a person with good thinking and logic but without a law degree would do just as well as a lawyer in being a judge.

Okay, let's say you're a judge and you get a commercial real estate case in Boston Massachusetts, in which the defendant broke their lease early and is refusing to pay a pro-rated lease break fee in their contract on the grounds that it's unreasonable and violates established precedent. The plaintiff argues that the defendant signed the contract, knew what they were getting into, and needs to pay the fee.

You discover that the plaintiff has not made any effort to find new tenants and has not listed the building as being available, and has not fulfilled their "duty to mitigate."

You discover that some portion of the defendants precedent is based on residential, not commercial cases.

What other questions do you ask? Should the landlord be allowed to charge any lease break fee, or write any penalties into the contract that they want? What if the lease is a 5 year term, the lessee broke the lease in the first 6 months, the lease break fee is the remainder of the 5 year term, and the landlord found a new tenant within a month of the old one leaving?

These are the sorts of cases that judges rule on all the time. There may be no clear "right and wrong" where you can sort of go "Oh yeah, clearly, that's illegal and the harm lies here, and your evidence sucks, and so my ruling is this" The cases may involve layers upon layers of state and local laws, and precedent going decades back -- for good reason.

I would argue that someone who wasn't trained in "the law" wouldn't be able to _consistently_ ask the right questions and evaluate each party's argument appropriately. Do residential landlord/tenant laws apply to commercial cases? Does the landlord have a duty to mitigate in this situation? How many rights are people allowed to "sign away" in a contract, and which rights are protected? Is the harm to the tenant weighed appropriately against the harm to the landlord within the boundaries established by law?

I consider myself to be a pretty logical and rigorous thinker, but I certainly wouldn't be confident in my ability to correctly and efficiently handle cases like this, and ask the right questions, day in and day out. Sure, maybe spend a week of research and get back to you, but if you're seeing multiple cases a day? Forget about it.

Appointed judges in Canada have worked out very well.

But they have to be appointed by a sane, non-partisan committee. US political hackery would probably make this untenable so maybe elected judges are the best options for them. Hmmm.

Ah, the theory that passing through a higher educational level will somehow increase the righteousness of people. Has that ever been true?

Well, it might acquaint you with the rules of the law. Or it might not--a lawyer friend long ago talked about a judge in his city whose weak grasp of the rules of evidence allowed counsel to use hearsay evidence, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com