Judge Posner Opinion Mocks Brief, Suggests Sending Lawyer to Jail

Alison Frankel writes for Thomson Reuters:

In an interview last November with The Daily Beast, Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals explained why he wouldn’t want to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. “I don’t think it’s a real court,” Posner said. “It’s a quasi-political party. President, House of Representatives, Supreme Court. It’s very political. And they decide which cases to hear, which doesn’t strike me as something judges should do. You should take what comes.”

That idea – that judges should not shape the law by cherry-picking cases but by deciding the cases that come their way – stuck with me. Posner’s not completely ingenuous, because, as he goes on to say in the interview, he does pick which opinions he wants to write and assigns out the rest. Nevertheless, it says something profound about American justice that Posner applies his incisive intellect to a semi-random gamut of cases, matters large and small, legally interesting and run-of-the-mill.

The acerbic judge was at his worst – or best, depending on your perspective – in an opinion Wednesday that’s already become an instant classic. Posner mocked the brief filed by a car crash victim and her lawyer, who were found in civil contempt for failing to deposit $180,000 in a trust account while they fight over the money with a union healthcare fund, as “a gaunt, pathetic document” with a grand total of 118 words of argument (including citations). He said the conduct of the crash victim and her lawyer was “egregious” and “outrageous,” and directed the trial judge presiding over their dispute with the union fund to consider throwing them in jail for contempt until they’ve come up with the $180,000. Posner suggested that the Justice Department might also be interested in the case, and then, to boot, scolded the trial judge, U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow of Chicago, for permitting the case to drag on as “the stench rose.” Would Posner get to write such a masterpiece if he were on the Supreme Court? I think not. . . .