From the Courts: Columnist’s Humor Pleases His Readers

On his occasional forays into public to make speeches about the funny state of the law, audiences tell him that they had envisioned him as “old and portly.”

“I guess it is the wisdom I display in the column,” deadpanned Milt Policzer, who writes a Daily Journal column spoofing lawyers and the law called From the Courts.

Balding but neither old nor portly, Policzer is 34 and lean from running, tennis and dieting contests. He is easy to spot in a roomful of lawyers in his uniform of jeans, running shoes and a T-shirt emblazoned with “From the Courts” or a picture of Destroyer Duck, one of his favorite comic book heroes.

Policzer abandoned “serious journalism” in 1982 when he quit as a full-time Daily Journal reporter to do the column as a free-lance writer for $45 a day.

From the Courts started as a serious column of brief news items about suits filed in federal and state courts. Policzer found it hard to take the suits seriously, however, and soon began satirizing the stilted language of unnamed lawyers.

The column occupies most of his working day, or what he calls his “play time”--about three hours a day to peruse 300 or so state and federal petitions, more time to read odd appellate opinions or research obscure laws and a quick 45 minutes to turn out a 1,000-word column. He usually has a backlog of 15 columns.

Suits sure to set Policzer to chuckling are those filed against the Southern California Rapid Transit District. A dedicated bus rider during a year when he was between cars, Policzer pictures for his readers the sick-joke scenarios of how people get trapped by bus doors, made sillier by arcane legalese. One door, he noted recently, closed “upon plaintiff’s both upper and lower arms and left ankle. . . .”

Policzer’s hobbies and his haunts become subjects of his column. He has collected comic books for more than 20 years, so readers learn about the legal principles explored by the likes of Destroyer Duck and Mary Worth.

He likes to go to wrestling matches, so readers are urged to consider hiring wrestlers to represent litigants in “alternative dispute resolutions,” something of a modern trial by combat, to ease overcrowded courts.

Policzer recently spoofed Ted Turner’s takeover bid for CBS by making a personal tender offer for all shares of Times Mirror Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times.

‘Little Family Operation’

“It’s a nice little family operation and we think it would be a lot of fun to run,” he explained to his readers, offering as his assets a stereo, a couple of tennis rackets and some clothes and debts of $5,200 in car payments. As his 1984 earnings per share he listed “not enough to share.”

Born in Rochester, N.Y., Policzer grew up in Salt Lake City, earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University, studied law at the University of Tulsa and finished his law degree at Southwestern University of Law in Los Angeles.

He returned to Utah to run the Utah Public Interest Research Group and said he “didn’t really accomplish much and lived in poverty for three years.” Next came a proofreading and editing stint at the Los Angeles Bar Review Center and then a job as legal affairs writer for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He became a Daily Journal reporter in 1981.

A member of the Utah and California bar associations, Policzer never intended to practice law. So why bother with law school and two bar exams?

“I had a great (entrance) test score and it seemed a shame to waste it,” he said. “It was sort of vanity and it still is. It is nice to be able to tell people you are a lawyer. It’s an ego trip.”

Mostly Favorable Mail

Readers love From the Courts. Those who don’t love it simply don’t read it.

Policzer said favorable mail runs about 50 to 1. Daily Journal Editor Kenneth Jost adds that the column is the second-best-read item in the paper after the Daily Appellate Reports and that most lawyers enjoy it. Only one advertiser threatened to withdraw his ads unless the column was halted. Jost bid him farewell.

Jost said the column is edited but rarely censored, with only occasional requests that a word or phrase be deleted because editors consider it in bad taste.

Daily Journal owner Charles T. Munger characterized Policzer as “a love-hate type of columnist. . . . A lot of people who don’t agree with him read him to make their blood boil.”

Compiling past columns into a book, Policzer tempers dreams of wider horizons with his delight in writing for the Daily Journal.

“It is a small audience and I would like something bigger,” he said, not too ambitiously. “But it is a devoted audience, and you have to like that.”

Wherever he writes and whatever he writes, he intends to make it funny.

“I tried serious journalism,” he said, “and that was a mistake.”