Presiding judge Katherine Feinstein is being forced to cut radically the Superior Court staff in the wake of more state budget cuts. It’s a serious problem — among other things, the cuts will allow landlords to evict tenants on a fast track, but won’t allow tenants to sue landlords on the same timeline. But the whole thing raises another interesting question: What are they going to do with all the judges?
San Francisco has 51 Superior Court judges — and if half the courtrooms are going to be essentially shut down, what will all those people do all day? You can’t run a courtroom without staff; at the very least, for any real judicial work to go forward, there has to be a court reporter to create a legal record. So a lot of the wheels of justice will simply grind to a halt.
You can’t lay off judges, of course — they’re elected officials. So they have to go to work every day and get paid. For what?
Well, I asked Ann Donlan, a spokesperson for Judge Feinstein (who, by the way, sounds just like her mother — it’s uncanny), she agreed it was an issue. “It will be Judge Feinstein’s job to keep them busy,” she said.
And no, they won’t be sitting around watching videos to learn about judicial demeanor.
For starters, 11 court commissioners who are getting laid off will have to be replaced — and that means full-on Superior Court judges will be handling drug court, the community justice center, even — yes — traffic court. This is typically stuff that’s considered below the pay grade of the men and women in black robes, but hey: Someone’s got to do it. “We may have to double up some judges in courtrooms,” Donlan said (and I wonder how that will work out).
Feinstein is hoping that the judges can spend a lot of time in chambers, trying to meet with litigants and settle cases. And I suspect some people (particularly plaintiffs) are going to be much more ready to settle, since it may be five or more years before a case can go to trial. Defendants, on the other hand, may be happy to wait it out; they get to keep their money for five years or more. So I don’t know how much settling is really going to go on.
I dunno; I bet someone’s going to making money selling golf shoes over at 400 McAllister.