Why do judges use a hammer in court? In many movies featuring a court scene, the judge is seen pounding a wood hammer on the desk to either silence the court room, or to announce a decision. Why do judges use a hammer? Is it only a Hollywood movie feature, or does it happen in real life? If it is the latter, what is the history behind this tradition?
The ceremonial hammer is called a gavel and usually looks like this: Stock image used with permission (Gavels in India and in the U.S. Senate which received its gavel as a diplomatic gift from India, don't have handles.) It is used in both courts and public meetings (most often city council meetings or legislative body committee meetings, but also, for example, in both the U.S. Senate and U.S. House) for the functional purpose of getting people's attention and telling them to shut up without having to make a shrill whistle or having to yell, both of which would be less dignified. It is a very ancient tradition in the common law tradition that dates all of the way back to when English lords presided over disputes between their subjects personally, before the specialized position of judge was invented, and has been used for pretty much the entire history of the United States, even dating back to the colonial period. I don't know if gavels are used outside of the common law legal tradition or not. It tends to be used more in public meetings than courtrooms these days because court hearings are not nearly as well attended as they used to be, so there aren't enough people making noise in the courtroom to make its use necessary. I have used one a few times to preside over political party meetings when I was political party official. These days, a typical court hearing today has only a judge, a bailiff, another court clerk, one or two lawyers for both sides, one or two parties for each side, and up to about four witnesses or spectators, plus a jury and a court reporter in a typical jury trial. Also, in court almost everyone is well behaved because the judge has direct contempt of court power (another vestige of directly imposition of justice by a lord or king that dates to the same time period as the gavel) and can throw anyone in the room in jail summarily if desired for minor misbehavior, a power that other people presiding over public meetings usually lack. But, historically (pre-television for the most part), in contrast, watching court hearings was a major form of community ritual and/or entertainment and crowds of dozens or more spectators were common. Sometimes in a court, when it is used, it is wielded by the bailiff (a court official charged with maintaining order in the court and supervising the jury) who often doubles as a law clerk or administrative assistant to the judge, rather than the judge. The bailiff is also the person who calls out "all rise" when the judge enters the room at the beginning of a hearing and when the judge leaves at the conclusion of a hearing. In rural areas, the bailiff/law clerk is usually armed. In urban areas, the sheriff for the county typically provides court security and the bailiff only ceremonially maintains courtroom order.
Judges don't have timesheet entries (and are often expressly excluded from FOIA obligations). They get paid salaries and are expected to work hard enough to clear their dockets in reasonable periods of time, however long that takes. If you wanted a more direct evidentiary estimate, you could estimate that a judge and his clerk together probably work 90-120 hours a week, figure out how many trials and hearings of what length were conducted and deduct that time spent on that from the total, and then divide the remaining hours by the number of opinions one can estimate that the judge wrote (or better yet, a reasonable estimate of the number of pages of opinions that one can estimate that the judge wrote). Typically, a lot of the legal research grunt work and more boilerplate parts of an opinion are written by the law clerk under some general instructions from the judge, with the judge writing the more substantive sections personally and heavily (or lightly, depending upon the quality of the law clerk) revising the draft opinion as a whole. The longer the opinion, the more likely it is that a substantial portion of it was written by the law clerk. For similar kinds of legal writing (e.g. appellate briefs and motions for summary judgment and proposed orders or written closing arguments) one to six hours per page from all professionals working on the document would be in the right ballpark. Judicial opinions come with some efficiencies, because once a judge decides a point of law or reaches a factual conclusion it doesn't have to be belabored in the same way that a litigant who isn't sure if their reasoning will be persuasive or not must. But, judicial opinions also typically have to spell out a greater proportion of legal and factual foundation for the end analysis that isn't hotly contested, will summarize all of the material points from the evidence presented in the case, and will frequently also recap in some detail the arguments made by the advocates for both sides of the case before actually engaging with those arguments in an analysis section. On balance, those factors probably pretty much balance out. If the judicial opinion is shorter, elegantly written, contains pithy turns of phrase, and/or contains lots of legal citations or factual analysis not raised by either party, it is probably closer to five or six hours per page or more. If the opinion is longer, has a rote and mechanical feel to it, and has very little factual analysis or references to law not mentioned by the parties, it is probably closer to one hour per page or even less. When some of these factors go one way, and other of these factors go the other way, it is probably in between in terms of hours per page. This said, sometimes it takes a judge a long time to write an opinion, but the end product is very short and elegant. In these situations, often what happened is that the judge and the judge's clerk spent lots and lots of hours writing a long and detailed first draft, then got an insight that provided a much more efficient and succinct way to reach a resolution to the case. In those circumstances, there would be dozens or scores of hours of work that went into the discarded first draft, only to be superseded by a half a dozen or dozen hours devoted to a much shorter final draft. In those cases, the final draft of the opinion might be ten or twenty hours per page or more once you include the time spent on the discarded draft. Of course, another factor is that some judges are just more efficient legal writers than others, and some judges have more familiarity with some areas of law than others. A opinion that might take one judge twenty hours to write might take another judge presiding over the very same case and producing an opinion of the same length and quality a hundred hours to write. The opinion in Meads v. Meads was 176 pages. If I had to make a best guess, I'd estimate that it probably took about 600 hours to write, probably about two-thirds of which was law clerk hours and probably about one-third of which was judge time.
Amicus briefs are never seen by juries. They only guide judges, and in the vast majority of cases, only appellate court judges. They are predominantly filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, a state supreme court, or a U.S. Court of Appeals circuit's panel. One of the most influential and most famous was the ACLU's amicus brief in the Brown v. Board of Education case, although there are hundreds of notable cases in which amicus briefs are influential, and dozens that are famous. The Anti-Defamation League (an organization devoted to fighting anti-semitism) also filed an influential amicus brief in Brown v. Board of Education. It is rarely possible to know with certainty how important a brief was (other than through echos of language or reasoning from the brief in the opinion itself), as judicial deliberations are generally strictly confidential. In a far lower profile case, for example, I once litigated a case in the Colorado Supreme Court in which an amicus brief from the Colorado Bar Association was probably very influential.
I haven't reviewed the filings, but I can tell you that it's perfectly routine for lawyers to describe the other side's position as &quot;plainly without merit,&quot; with no regard for the actual merits. The lawyer's job is to make his client look good, in court and in public; the existence of this question shows that he's doing a good job at least on the latter half of that equation. But in truth, it's such a generic thing to say that no lawyer who hears it will actually think it means anything. In all likelihood, the filing is like most others, in that it makes a good case on some points and a bad case on others, and the opposing lawyer's job is to argue that all of them are bad. In the rarer case that a filing is actually &quot;plainly without merit,&quot; courts can and sometimes do impose penalties under Rule 11, which allows for sanctions against parties and attorneys who make factual assertions that are not supported by reality or arguments that are not supported by the law.
The warning notice is intended for viewers and participants, not for the court to make its own official record of the proceedings. Presumably, it was this court record that the judge released for educational purposes under his own Order via Twitter. In which case, there has been no contempt of court.
Your kid is not in trouble; he's a minor. You're in trouble. A criminal case for the charges a prosecutor would bring, i.e. destruction of property (the data) or for a relevant cyber or computer crime (malware, etc.), and/or a civil case for damages due to the destruction of the data would both hinge on one point: the concept of intent. See intent - Wex Legal Information Institute and Civil Law vs. Criminal Law: The Differences | Rasmussen College. Did you knowingly intend to cause damage or data loss with the structure of the name? It's pretty clear you did. The structure of a name that can invoke an SQL command is not in any sense a standard name in spelling or format or punctuation. So how would you convince the jury or judge that you had no intent when you named your kid? The possible poor design of a data system that didn't sanitize inputs is no defense. Saying the door was unlocked so I assume the homeowners didn't care if I trashed their house will get you laughed into jail or on the hook for a stiff civil judgement.
“You put that, of course, respectfully?” You bet your ass Heydon is telling Newlands off. Knock down drag out fights in a courtroom are more subtle than in a barroom and the judge always wins. First we have the trivial issue that the barrister interrupted the commissioner while he was speaking! This is extreemly disrespectful and Heydon was pointing that out by calmly but sarcastically suggesting that the interruption should have started with “With respect ..,”. The clear implication that the interruption should not have happened at all. It doesn’t matter if you disagree with what the court is saying, you don’t interrupt, you wait for your opportunity to respond. You will be given it. That’s respect. More germanely, the barrister is in a tricky position. I don’t know what came before the video starts but it was clearly one Newlands did not expect but that Heydon thought was foreseeable. Newlands is trying to hide behind “I haven’t been instructed on that” but is having trouble because the client (or at least, the client’s representative) is in the room and can instruct him right now. Not being prepared in court is also disrespectful. At a rough guess, just the people you see in the video are costing somebody north of $10,000 per hour. You don’t show up for the big game, tell the coach you can’t play because you forgot your boots but that it’s not your fault. Particularly when the person standing behind you is holding your boots.
A settlement is fundamentally a contract where parties A and B promise to do certain things (one of them being "stop litigating"). A court order is an enforceable order to do something. A contract cannot be directly enforced (where force is used to make a person comply), it requires a court order for actual enforcement. The conditions of a contract might be enforceable, but you can't get the sheriff to come out based just on a contract. It appears that you got to the "facilitation" phase where the parties talk about the issue and the CRT case manager talks to the parties in neutral terms, aiming for an agreement. If you don't reach an agreement, the Tribunal Decision Process escalates the matter. Under the decision process, the CRT member makes a decision, and it can be enforced in court. They state that "For a $25 fee, the CRT can turn your agreement into an order, if both parties agree that an order should be issued. This is called a “consent resolution order”." I suppose that you did not go through that step, and you only have an agreement. So you would need a separate court process to get a court order. Because everything that you did in this negotiation phase is confidential, if you want CRT to give you something that is enforceable, you have to present the case from the beginning, since they don't have access to what has happened before. The problem in your account is that a settlement has to be reached by yourselves – possibly with the assistance of the CRT case manager. I assume you did actually get a settlement (agreement) with the landlord, but have not filed for a consent resolution order. It may be that the case is too old for you to just pay the $25, and it does require agreement by the other party. Read their FAQ about how cases end.