Courting Change : L.A. Judge Will Offer Reform Ideas to Peru

When Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Judith C. Chirlin travels to Peru next month as part of a court restructuring project there, she will carry a longstanding belief that courts must adapt to changing social needs.

Working on court reform has been her goal since law school. “I got a job as a lawyer because if you look in the classifieds you don’t see many listings for court reformers,” Chirlin said. She sought to become a judge because “they are the people who really have an impact on improving court systems.”

Chirlin, 44, will be the only judge among a group of Americans working next month with the U. S. Agency for International Development and the Peruvian government, said Gail Lecce, an AID administrator. A Peruvian Embassy official in Washington said the country has been seeking to strengthen its judiciary, and Lecce said that Peru is one of several Latin American countries seeking to make their court systems more independent.

Chirlin has visited Peru before as a court consultant. In 1978, she was invited by Peruvian jurists who met her when she was a judicial fellow at the U. S. Supreme Court, assigned by then-Chief Justice Warren E. Burger to work on judicial administration projects.

“She is being involved for her own special expertise,” Lecce said of Chirlin, who has taught judicial administration at USC since 1975 and is a board member of the American Judicature Society, a national group that promotes effective court administration.

Chirlin is frequently consulted by the makers of television’s “L.A. Law,” according to one producer, for advice that ranges from points of law to how the actress playing Grace Van Owen, a principal character in the show played by actress Susan Dey, should feel and act as a judge.

Chirlin was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. After graduating from USC’s Law School, she represented airlines before former Gov. George Deukmejian appointed her to the bench in 1985. She handled criminal cases until two years ago, and now hears civil matters.

“I want to be involved in improving court systems,” Chirlin said in her downtown Los Angeles courtroom last week. A personal injury trial, involving a woman standing in a First Interstate Bank elevator that fell more than 50 floors after the 1988 high-rise fire, was in recess. The West Los Angeles resident sat in her chambers, filled with law books, photographs of Supreme Court justices and several dispensers full of jellybeans--intended, she said, “to try and sweeten people’s dispositions.” She also had several Peruvian artifacts on display.

Chirlin said Peru has a civil law system based on the Napoleonic Code. While trials in the United States are “pretty much oral,” in Peru, she said, “virtually everything is done in writing. Judges go out and interview witnesses and they write reports.”

Officials have told her that Peru is interested in switching to an oral system, Chirlin said, which would require an administrative overhaul and extensive retraining of personnel. She speaks Spanish, she said, but is not fluent in the language.

In California, Chirlin has been involved in efforts to make courts more accessible and culturally sensitive. In 1990, she was vice chairwoman of a statewide committee that found far-ranging sex discrimination in California’s court system.

She now sits on the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s planning and research committee. “Take a look at Los Angeles now and see the recent census showing that people of Anglo-Caucasian background are no longer the majority of people in California,” she said. “In another 30 years that’s going to be more pronounced.”

Courts will have to educate newcomers as well as judges and court personnel, she said. “I had a situation not too long ago when I was asked to grant an order to restrain defendants from spreading human ash and burying human bones on some property.”

Both sides were from Sri Lanka, involved in a landlord-tenant dispute. One side came before Chirlin claiming that the other was “trying to perform voodoo on their property to get them to vacate,” she said, and brought samples of the ashes and bones to show her.

She issued an order forbidding the defendants to put ashes or bones on the property, and made rulings that severed the relationship between the two parties, so that voodoo was no longer an issue.

Chirlin follows other cases involving cultural differences, to become more aware and devise techniques to make newcomers confident the American court system can serve them.

“One of the big problems Peru has,” she said, “is that no one has any confidence in the court system. As our population changes, we have to understand (newcomers), or they will lose confidence in our system.”