Proposal for developing the auditing of judges’ decisions using the database of Harvard Law Library and Ravel Law

Messrs. Daniel Lewis, CEO; Nik Reed, CEE;
Adam Pingel, VP of Engineering; and Cory Bray, Director of Sales
Ravel Law
San Francisco, CA

Dear Ravel Law Management Team,

I read with great interest the article “Harvard Law Library Readies Trove of Decisions for Digital Age”[1] and reviewed your website[2], which was referred to therein. The article quotes you as saying that you hope to make analytical tools available that will allow “a lawyer to see how a particular judge has responded to certain kinds of motions in the past” and that you and Harvard will “share the entire underlying database with scholars that wish to develop specialized applications”. It also states that the rationale of your partner, Harvard Law School Dean Martha Winow, for opening HLL’s trove to the public is that “Improving access to justice is a priority”.

I am a scholar and my study of judges and their judiciaries is titled:

Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and
Consequent Riskless Wrongdoing:
Pioneering the news and publishing field of
judicial unaccountability reporting[3].

If the official statistics collected and analyzed there(id. jur:65§§1-3) give you probable cause to believe that regardless of whether lawyers or pro ses[4] access judicial decisions for free or for a fee judges do not read their briefs,

  1. will you continue to be “passionate about delivering ground-breaking new products to the industry”, thus offering a product not fit to attain the intended purpose of enhancing ‘access to justice’ through better researched briefs; or
  2. will you use your product in a different way reasonably calculated first to expose judges’ pervasive failure to read briefs and then to lead to profound judicial reform that ensures that access to a law database is added to several new steps(jur:158§§6-8) toward enhancing the chances of ‘accessing justice’?

This alternative confronts you with the choice between being a salesman of an ineffective product and a national Champion of Justice.

Indeed, the federal circuit courts –the model for their state counterparts– dispose of circa 75% of all appeals by reasonless summary orders66a and up to 16% more by decisions so “perfunctory”68 that the judges themselves mark them “not for publication” and “not precedential”70, thus turning them into arbitrary, secret, and ad hoc fiats of raw judicial power.

They risklessly issue such decisions because their chief circuit22a judges dismiss 99.82%(jur:10-14) of complaints18a against them; with other judges they deny up to 100% of appeals to review such dismissals(24§b). So in the 226 years since the creation of the Federal Judiciary in 1789, the number of its judges –2,217 were on the bench on 30sep1313– impeached and removed is 814!

If judges strained to read every brief and write excellent decisions in every case, they would not be rewarded with a salary increase or promoted by their chief judges, for those decisions are made by politicians and on other grounds.

Having no deterrence from deciding cases without reading their briefs or incentive to read them, judges skip briefs to work less and make decisions to grab material, professional, and social benefits(ol:173¶93).

If you held your job for life with a salary that could not be diminished12 and power over people’s property, liberty, and the rights and duties that determine their lives, would you too abuse it for your own and your peers’ gain?

I wish to develop judicial decisions auditing. I have worked out several proposals in detail, from:

  1. collecting even the unpublished 9 out of 10 decisions and using their analysis in litigation(ol:274); to
  2. conducting academic research on them(ol:60, 115);
  3. subjecting them to advanced statistical, linguistic, and literary analysis to develop a high end commercial IT product(ol:42; jur:131§b); and on to
  4. showing the need(jur:5§3) for judicial reform in the People’s interest in ‘government, not of men and women, but by the rule of law'(ol:201§§J-K).

I can make a presentation thereon at a video conference or in person. So 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
New York City

Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, CorderoRic@yahoo.com, Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@cantab.net, Dr.Richard.Cordero.Esq@outlook.com

__________________________________

[1] http://refreshingnews99.blogspot.in/2015/10/harvard-law-library-readies-trove-of.html 

[2] https://www.ravellaw.com/

[3] http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

or http://1drv.ms/1IkvhB8

or http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/jur/DrRCordero_jud_unaccountability_reporting.pdf

If these links do not download the file in Internet Explorer, download either of the following browsers, install it, copy the first link above into the browser search box, and hit ‘Enter’. If the file, which has over 760 pages and is more than 50MB in size, does not download, try using the other links:

Google Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/
or
Mozilla-Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/products/firefox/download-and-install.

This letter with all its footnote and (parenthetical) references as active links to their supporting or additional materials is found in the study at page ol:327. Just click on any such reference to jump to its corresponding material.

[4] In the Federal Judiciary, 52% of all appellants are pro ses; see footnotes 35, 38, 64 in the study. That percentage has been trending upward for years and is likely to find a parallel in the percentage of parties that appear pro se at all levels of the federal and state judiciaries because counseled representation has continuously become less affordable.

Moreover, it is highly more realistic to expect the users of your database to be pro ses rather than lawyers because the latter were trained at law school to use Westlaw and LexisNexis and realize the significant advantage of conducting research and writing with the guidance of their editorial enhancements, such as key numbers, headnotes, digests, synopses, encyclopedic overviews, analytical commentaries on points of law, etc. Lawyers can access those commercial databases, not only by a law firm or solo practitioner subscription, but also through their law schools and, on a reciprocity basis between schools, at other schools; court and public libraries; bar associations; etc.

However, at issue here is not which law database is more helpful, but rather whether the use of any database helps lawyers and pro ses in any way whatsoever to ‘force’ judges to read the briefs filed with them and make their decisions based on the statements of facts and legal arguments contained therein.

Published by

Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.

Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq., is a doctor of law and researcher-writer attorney. He is a member of the New York State Bar and lives in New York City. He earned his doctorate of law from the University of Cambridge in England, where his thesis dealt with the integration of the banking industry in the European Union. He earned a French law degree from La Sorbonne in Paris, where he concentrated on currency stability and the abuse of dominant positions by entities in commerce, similar to American antitrust law. He also earned a Master of Business Administration from the University of Michigan, where he concentrated on the use of computers and their networks to maximize workflow efficiency and productivity. Dr. Cordero worked as a researcher-writer at the preeminent publisher of analytical legal commentaries, Lawyers Cooperative Publishing, a member of West/Thomson Reuters. There he wrote commentaries on the regulation of financial activities under federal law. Currently at Judicial Discipline Reform, he is promoting the creation of a multidisciplinary academic and business team to advocate judges’ accountability and discipline reform. The need for such reform is based on his analysis of official statistics, reports, and statements of the Federal Judiciary and its judges, who are the models for their state counterparts. That analysis is set forth in his study of the Federal Judiciary and its judges, the models for their state counterparts: 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 Dr. Cordero offers to make a presentation at a video conference or in person to you and your colleagues of the evidence of judicial wrongdoing so that you may learn how to join the effort to expose it and bring about judicial reform. Contact him at Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net. Dare trigger history!(* >jur:7§5)…and you may enter it. * http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates.pdf

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