9th U.S. Circuit Court to Experiment With Hearing Cases in S.D.

When a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals comes into town next week, local attorneys say, San Diego will take a significant step toward coming of age in the legal world.

Though it is the second-largest city in the 9th Circuit--a court whose turf covers seven Western states, Hawaii, Alaska and the South Pacific territories of the United States--San Diego has been a stepchild of the court, San Diego lawyers believe.

Groggy attorneys and clients perennially have climbed aboard early-bird trains or fought freeway traffic to argue before the court in Los Angeles, killing a day to make appearances as brief as 10 to 15 minutes.

Beginning with next week’s experimental visit to the U.S. Courthouse downtown, however, lawyers are hopeful that those costly trips will become less common.

“I’d like to think San Diego has grown beyond the stage of being criticized or characterized as a suburb of Los Angeles,” defense lawyer John Cleary said Wednesday. “We are a big city and we generate a volume practice, both in civil and criminal cases.”

Cleary has circulated a letter to local lawyers, urging a large turnout at a luncheon and cocktail party honoring the circuit court judges next week “to show we want cases heard in San Diego.”

He and other attorneys have pressed for years to have the court, whose three-judge panels review cases appealed from U.S. District Court, schedule hearings here.

But lawyers can recall only two visits by the circuit court in the last 25 years--once in the late 1970s during an experiment proposed by Circuit Judge J. Clifford Wallace, whose office is in San Diego, and once to honor the late Circuit Judge James Carter.

“By the judges coming here, they as public servants serve the people better,” contends Paul Wells, who said he often advocated court visits to San Diego during a three-year term as a delegate to the 9th Circuit’s lawyer-judge conference.

“The typical argument takes less than an hour,” Wells said. “If I have to go to Los Angeles, it takes a full day. And since the only thing a lawyer has to sell is his time, he has to charge somebody for that. So he charges his client.”

Clearly, the court has begun to listen to the lawyers’ entreaties.

It has scheduled a full week of hearings, 29 cases in all, in the ceremonial courtroom of the U.S. District Court. Chief Judge James Browning, an appointee of President John F. Kennedy, will head the three-judge panel. Circuit Judge Charles Wiggins, a former El Monte congressman, and Circuit Judge Melvin Brunetti will sit beside him.

The trip to San Diego--and a week of hearings scheduled in Phoenix during December--will add nothing to the court’s normal costs, according to Circuit Executive William Davis, who directs the circuit’s operations from its headquarters in San Francisco.

Judges travel each month from offices scattered throughout the West to San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle, the court’s primary hearing sites. Occasionally, the judges hear cases in Portland, Ore.; Alaska and Hawaii.

Thus it makes little difference economically whether Brunetti, quartered in Reno, Nev., and Browning and Wiggins, with offices in San Francisco, pack their bags for San Diego or Los Angeles, where next week’s calendar would normally have been heard, Davis said.

“They go one place or another anyway,” he explained.

Efficiency and, perhaps, inertia--not expense--have been the primary causes for hesitation in traveling beyond the court’s accustomed hearing sites, he said.

“It’s a question of breaking a routine,” Davis said. “If we do it in San Diego and Phoenix, how does it relate to Las Vegas and Reno, or Boise and Boseman, Mont.--the other places in the circuit where we don’t sit?”

Moreover, he said, in deciding whether to make the San Diego side trip a regular occurrence, the judges will carefully weigh whether it interferes with their efficient review of cases and drafting of opinions, the daily grind of processing the 5,900 appeals that come before the 9th Circuit each year.

“The extent to which the accommodations are conducive to the work environment is a very important factor, because that affects the court’s productivity,” Davis said.

Local lawyers say that more than their own convenience is at stake in swaying the court to make San Diego a regular stop in its travels.

“Getting out of their towers is probably beneficial to everybody who has an opportunity to do it,” said Peter Bowie, chief assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego.

The U.S. attorney’s office and its leading antagonist in court, the Federal Public Defender’s office, both expect to realize efficiencies from the circuit judges’ visit.

Federal Defender Judy Clarke said her small staff sometimes has been decimated when four or five of its members have had to travel to Los Angeles for court hearings. Bowie noted that U.S. District Courts in San Diego sometimes have had to delay cases because so many defense attorneys and prosecutors have hit the road.

All the logical arguments aside, however, attorney Sidney Stutz acknowledged that a certain chauvinism has fueled the local bar’s campaign to bring the court to San Diego.

“There certainly is an element of being able to present yourself as a full-size metropolitan area when you have a circuit court that’s involved here on some type of regular basis,” Stutz said. “You can call that local pride, and that certainly was involved.”