Sheffield to Donate Services : Former Judge to Help Court During Summer

William Sheffield, the offbeat, sometimes irascible, always colorful former Orange County Superior Court judge, will be returning to the bench as a temporary judge for three months this summer after completing his first year at Yale Divinity School.

Sheffield, who resigned last September after 20 months on the bench, will return May 20 and will work without pay to help the court with its backlog of civil cases.

“It’s a good deal for us,” said Presiding Judge Everett W. Dickey, who has two vacancies on the bench and no provision in the law for paying temporary judges.

Sheffield said he hopes to preside over three monthlong trials, but will help out wherever he can.

Novel Duty Foreseen

While he probably will handle some trials, he also may be overseeing the court’s first intensive effort to use mock, or advisory, juries to help lawyers and litigants settle lawsuits, Dickey said.

Earlier this year, the presiding judge said, jurors waiting to be called for trials listened to lawyers in one case explain the evidence each side had. Once the jury gave its “decision,” the lawyers talked with a judge and settled the case. The 1 1/2-day effort eliminated the need for a 25-day jury trial, Dickey said.

Such new, or different, ways of doing things usually appeal to Sheffield, who shaped some new court procedures and engineered what he liked to call “cafe law and motion” a year ago while on the court’s law and motion panel.

He thought that the panel, which resolves pretrial legal issues, could get through an onerous caseload easier if it offered coffee and doughnuts to opposing lawyers in an effort to get them to resolve or limit their differences without a court ruling.

Many of the lawyers did not like the idea, and the court went back to hearing formal arguments after Sheffield left and was replaced by two commissioners.

After he started attending classes at divinity school last fall, Sheffield found out he would have to learn the Greek language, so he and his wife planned to go to the Greek isles this summer for intensive training.

‘Productive Summer’

“We went to Spain for the spring break and lay around on the beach for a while, which is what we had in mind for the summer,” he said. “But we both decided we wanted a more productive summer.

“Unfortunately, I still have to learn Greek,” he said.

Sheffield plans to spend his next academic year at Brigham Young University to study Christianity from the Mormon perspective.

“What I’m hoping to do in the end is resolve the credibility of Joseph Smith in my own mind,” said the former judge, who studied Mormonism last term and believes that, “at the very least,” the church founder was “a genius.”