‘Is Private Justice Fair?’

There lies, deep in the soul of every American, an egalitarian spirit which is, at once, one of our strengths and a constant invitation to shoot ourselves in the foot.

Twenty five of us in Los Angeles County have been engaged, for two years, in an effort often known as the “fast-track,” designed to radically improve the speed of our civil courts. It is quite possible to get a major case in one of our courts resolved in under a year , a far cry from the five-year wait which was standard a couple of years ago. We’ve done this through awfully hard work (by ourselves, our staffs and lawyers), by better methods and, perhaps, even with mirrors, but we’ve done it with no new judicial resources and the simplest of truths is that we need every bit of help we can get from “the outside,” whether it be arbitration, voluntary settlement programs or retired judges, working as “rent-a-judges.”

I ask counsel in many of the thousand cases I inherited at the beginning of “fast-track” to use rent-a-judges for settlement conferences, pointing out that the $300 or $400 fee will be less than their copying bill. This minuscule (compared to legal fees and costs) expenditure has settled perhaps 200 cases this year, each of which would average easily five days each to try.

The benefit to counsel and the citizens involved in those cases which do have to be actually tried is extraordinary and the notion that only the wealthy utilize rent-a-judges is, in my experience, simply nonsense: Their use, in a great number of cases saves parties lots of money, mostly in legal fees.

Before we join Madame Defarge in the zealous pursuit of total equality, we should be pretty sure the shrouds aren’t being knitted for large numbers of innocent victims--the litigants of all economic levels in our state.

ERIC E. YOUNGER

Superior Court Judge

Central Civil Courts