A realistic alternative that takes advantage of presidential politics to inform the national public about, and outrage it at, judges’ wrongdoing and cause the public to demand nationally televised hearings on judicial wrongdoing
By
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
M.B.A., University of Michigan Business School
D.E.A., La Sorbonne, Paris
Judicial Discipline Reform
http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
New York City
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, CorderoRic@yahoo.com, Dr.Richard.Cordero.JDR@gmail.com, DrCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
This article may be republished and redistributed, provided it is in its entirety and without any addition, deletion, or modification, and credit is given to its author, Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
A. Barriers to access to the Supreme Court: the booklet format, the preference given to a few lawyers, the 1 in 100 review chance, and the cost of representation
1. The problem begins with the format of the brief and the record to be filed. It can cost $100,000 or more just to pay a specialized company to transcribe and print the record on appeal in the booklet format required by Rule 33(*>jur:47fn77) of the Rules of the Supreme Court because if you do not qualify as indigent to file in forma pauperis, you cannot file them on regular 8.5” x 11” paper.(jur:47§1)
All (blue text references) herein are keyed to my study of judges and their judiciaries titled and downloadable as follows:
Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and
Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing:
Pioneering the news and publishing field of
judicial unaccountability reporting*
* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf
2. Even so, since in the last few years some 7,250 cases were filed per year in the Court, but it disposed of an average of only 78 cases, your chances of having your case taken for review are roughly 1 in 100(cf. jur:47fn81a). In the casinos of Las Vegas, your odds of winning are better.
3. Your odds of having your case reviewed by the Court are substantially worse if you are not represented by one of the “superlawyers”†, whose cases are decidedly preferred by the Supreme Court: 8 superlawyers argued 20% of cases in the nine years between 2004-2012. They command whatever attorney’s fee the law of offer and demand allows, which only a few, mostly corporate parties, can afford.
4. In fact, taking a case all the way to final adjudication in the Supreme Court can cost more than $1,000,000(jur:48fn83). If it remands to the trial court for a new trial, you start all over again.
† a. The Echo Chamber…At America’s court of last resort, a handful of lawyers now dominates the docket; Reporters Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts, and John Shiffman, Reuters Investigates, Thomson Reuters; 8dec14; http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/scotus/
b. Elite circle of lawyers finds repeat success getting cases to the Supreme Court; Gwen Ifill interviews Joan Biskupic, Legal Affairs Editor in Charge, Reuters; PBS NewsHour; 9dec14; http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/elite-circle-lawyers-finds-repeat-success-getting-cases-supreme-court/
5. Judicial review in the Supreme Court is not only discretionary with the justices, it is also illusory(jur:48§2; cf. 46§3).
6. If you cannot download the Rules of the Court(jur:47fn77b) and pay attention to, and comply with, their hundreds of minute details, you cannot reasonably expect the Court to take your case for review. The clerk will not accept your case for filing.
7. Nor can you expect the Chief Justice and the eight Associate Justices of the august Supreme Court of the United States, sitting on the high bench to hear oral argument before the national press and a select audience of guests, let a pro se babble, ramble, and rant about the facts of the case and his heartfelt pain at so much injustice visited upon him by the adverse party.
8. That scenario is simply not possible, an idea born of ignorance of, or reckless disregard for, the applicable standards of performance and court decorum.
9. Rather, the justices expect knowledgeable and authoritative arguments based on legal precedent and firmly established or proposed principles of law. They want clarification about any points discussed in the briefs that raised questions in their minds, asking the kind of questions that are the most difficult to answer as they demand a firm command of the law: What are the legal implications of that point? The law is a system. Points of law have to fit together for the law to make sense. A pro se cannot wing it when answering those questions.
10. Therefore, do you have the money to retain a member of the Supreme Court bar to argue your case? If you do not have money to even pay a lawyer to review your papers before filing them, you don’t.
B. A case filed by a pro se in a federal court is weighted as a third of a case
11. When you file a case in a federal district court, you have to file a Case Information Sheet. It asks, among other things, whether you are represented or pro se. You are appearing pro se. The consequences thereof at the brief in-take office of the clerk of court are funereal without the solemnity: Your case was dead on arrival and is sent right away to potter’s field.
12. In the Federal Judiciary, pro se cases are weighted as a third of a case(jur:43fn65a >page 40). By comparison, “a death-penalty habeas corpus case is assigned a weight of 12.89”(jur:43¶81). As a result of such weighting, a pro se case is given some 39 times less attention than a death penalty case regardless of the pro se case’s nature, what is at stake in it, and whether the complaint was written by joe the plumber or a law professor.
13. Your brief is likely not to be read at all…that is the whole purpose of the Case Information Sheet: to tell the court on half of one side of one page what the case is all about and what relief the party is requesting so that if the court does not want to grant it, why bother reading the brief?
C. Justice is blind, but the judge sees the incompetence of pro se pleadings
14. A federal district judge has hundreds of weighted cases. In fact, “a judicial emergency [is not declared until there is a] vacancy in a district court where weighted filings are in excess of 600 per judgeship”(jur36fn57).
15. Hence, the judge is expected not to waste her time with a pro se case, which is most likely poorly written by an emotional plaintiff who ran to court to complain without a clue whether the law gave him a cause of action against the defendant and, if it did, without any notion of the elements of the action that he must prove and the admissible evidence that he must introduce to prove each of them.
16. Indeed, the pro se, ignoring how to state a case, is likely to plunge in his opening paragraph into a rambling rant full of legally irrelevant matters. Why would the judge expect the rest of the complaint or other paper to be any better? She knows from experience that pro ses hardly ever cite cases as precedential support for what they say and do not lay out arguments of law, but instead intone articles of faith and cries of pain caused by an intuitive sense of justice denied.
17. As a result, your pro se brief reaches the judge tainted by the presumption of irrelevancy, inadmissibility, and incompetence. The judge will give it the perfunctory attention that the official weighting of the case enables her to give it. The weighting works as a self-fulfilling expectation: Because upon your filing of your case in the in-take office it was considered already not worth a case, not even half a case, but merely a third of it, the judge will do a quick job of disposing of it as worthless.
18. Just because paper holds everything one writes on it, the writing on it by a pro se does not produce a brief of law. He is likely to have stated a case so inadequately that it will be considered incapable of surviving a motion for dismissal for “failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted” by a court, that is, a Rule12(b)(6) motion under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure(FRCivP; ol:5b/fn15e).
19. It follows that as a pro se, you do not stand a chance at getting a due process fair hearing or reading. You are DoA.
D. A pro se is likely not to have a clue of what subject matter jurisdiction is and how its absence can doom his case
20. Worse yet, you have to show something of which you, as a pro se and a lay person at that, are presumed not to have the faintest idea: subject matter jurisdiction(FRCivP 12(b)(1); ol:5b/fn15e). This means that you have to show that the federal court has the authority conferred upon it by statute as interpreted by case law to entertain your type of case and use its judicial power to adjudicate the controversy that opposes you to the defendant.
21. You cannot run to federal court and ask it to intervene in a purely state law matter, such as family, probate, and zoning law are. It is simply not enough for you to allege that the state judge and a host of other state officials engaged in what you, in your law-untrained opinion and your emotional state of mind as a party, a parent, an heir, or a resident in the neighborhood consider to be corruption.
22. The issue of subject matter jurisdiction is so important that it cannot be waived: The defendant cannot confer upon the court authority to hear and decide your type of case by merely failing to raise an objection to it in its answer or by motion to dismiss. At any time, even in the middle of trial, the defendant can move to dismiss the case, thus terminating it, due to the court’s lack of subject matter jurisdiction. What is more, the court can do so on its own motion upon realizing that it does not have authority to deal with the type of matter presented to it.
23. In fact, when judges do not feel like dealing with a case, they take the easy way out by simply claiming that they do not have subject matter jurisdiction. Plaintiff’s only remedy is to go up on appeal to argue a highly technical issue of law. Do you have any idea how to argue that the court has subject matter jurisdiction based on common law, a statutory provision, notions of federalism, and the equal protection of the laws of the 14th Amendment after analogizing your type of case to another type that was held to fall within the court’s jurisdiction?
24. You may hate lawyers because many are deceitful, uncaring, money grabbing fraudsters. Yet, it is logically sound to assume that people who went to law school for three years know something about the law that people who did not go there ignore. The same applies to those who successfully conducted doctoral research, analysis, and writing. How do you think the judge will react if you tell her that you consider the above statement arrogant and elitist?
E. A more realistic strategy for judicial wrongdoing exposure and reform that takes advantage of presidential politics and the mood of The Dissatisfied With The Establishment, including the dissatisfied with the judicial and legal systems
25. Presidential politics offers the opportunity to reach out to Establishment-outsider Donald Trump, who has already dare criticize a federal judge, and through him the national media that cover him so that we, victims of wrongdoing judges and advocates of honest judiciaries, may implement a realistic judicial wrongdoing exposure and reform strategy.
26. That strategy rests firmly on two foundations:
a. the strategic thinking principle “The enemy of my enemy is my friend…and by helping him I help myself”; and
b. the first law of interaction between two or more persons, i.e., horsetrading!…because social life is a give and take:
27. The strategy is concrete, reasonable, and feasible:
a. Mr. Trump and the media, each acting in their own electoral or commercial interest(†>ol2:416§B), can inform the national public about judges’ wrongdoing and so outrage the public at it as to stir it up to demand that politicians, lest they be voted out of, or not into, office, call for, and conduct, nationally televised hearings on such wrongdoing as the first step toward judicial reform(jur:158§§6-8).
† http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf
- You can contribute to implementing that strategy. To that end, I respectfully invite you to:
a. share the below letter to Mr. Trump(‡>ol2:437) as widely as possible by sending it to your emailing list and posting it to yahoo- and googlegroups and blog.
‡ http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/16-5-21DrRCordero-DJTrump.pdf
1) See a list of yahoogroups(†>ol2:433);
† http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf
b. network(ol:231) with colleagues, friends, and acquaintances of yours who can network with theirs so as to reach Trump campaign officers#) to persuade them to invite me to present to them how it is in their own(ol:317¶28) electoral interest for Mr. Trump to denounce judges’ wrongdoing and thereby draw the attention of the media and The Dissatisfied With The Establishment, especially its huge(ol:311¶1) untapped voting bloc of the dissatisfied with the judicial and legal systems, including victims of wrongdoing judges and advocates of honest judiciaries;
1) Campaign Chairman and Chief Strategist Paul Manafort,
2) General Counsel Michael Cohen, Esq.,
3) Mrs. Ivanka Trump,
4) Mr. Donald Trump, Jr.,
5) Mr. Eric Trump, and
6) Running Mate Gov. Mike Pence,
c. download‡ and print the letter to distribute it at political rallies to the attendees, in general, and to each member of the campaign staff and officers, in particular; and
d. organize a presentation to professors, students, and officers at journalism, law, business, and Information Technology schools and similar entities(ol:197§G) so that I may present to them:
1) the give and take letter to Mr. Trump;
2) the evidence of judges’ unaccountability and wrongdoing(jur:21§§A,B); and
3) the way for them to participate in a multidisciplinary academic(ol:60; 112-120; 255) and business(jur:119§1; ol:271-273) venture to pioneer the field of judicial unaccountability reporting and judicial reform advocacy.
- So that you may feel confident in networking me with others, I offer to first make a presentation at a video conference or in person to you, your colleagues, friends, and acquaintances.
- Let’s not miss this window of opportunity to make of judicial wrongdoing exposure and reform a decisive issue of the presidential campaign(ol2:422). Time is of the essence.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Dare trigger history!(*>jur:7§5)…and you may enter it.
Sincerely,
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Judicial Discipline Reform
www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
New York City
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net,
DrCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org,
CorderoRic@yahoo.com,
Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@cantab.net,
Dr.Richard.Cordero.JDR@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-richard-cordero-esq/4b/8ba/50/
NOTE: Given the suspicious interference with Dr. Cordero’s email addresses described at *>ggl:1 et seq., when emailing him place the above bloc of his email addresses in the To: line of your email to enhance the chances of its reaching him at least at one of those addresses.
* http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf
