In case you aren’t familiar with it, here’s the trolley problem in its purest form:
A runaway trolley is heading toward five people tied to a track. You can pull a lever to divert it onto another track, where it will kill one person instead.
Do you actively intervene to save five lives at the cost of one, or do nothing and let five die?
I'm in court as I write this. My judge today had a Trolley Problem. The list was short, only six cases. One was an emergency injunction, and the rest were minor procedural matters.
The judge had to make a decision: Hear as many cases as she could, or focus on the injunction, and leave many counsel and litigants disappointed.
It was a classic Trolley Problem, translated into courthouse terms. The judge wasn’t sure what to do.
One of the unimportant cases was brought by a man who lost his professional license five years ago, and who is suing the government and his former governing body and the parties who had complained about him, along with the witnesses that they called. He's suing his former lawyer, and opposing counsel as well. He named the judge that dismissed his case, and the judges who refused his appeal. He was suing everyone for everything all at once.
It was a nothing case, a case made to be dismissed. The kind of case you put to the back of the line. But the man had no lawyer, and that changed everything.
“I’m a self-rep,” the man said, “and I just want to say a few things.” He was the respondent to a motion to strike. It wasn't even his turn to speak. But he just wanted to say a few things.
“Go ahead,” the judge said.
That was at ten a.m. It's past noon, and the man is still talking.
So the judge solved the Trolley Problem. We have a precedent. Save the self-rep, and send all the other parties home.
I watched a hearing on youtube where the moving party was pro se. The channel featured a lawyer who would add commentary from time to time. The hearing was to exclude some evidence as part of a DUI case. I think it was to exclude the blood draw or maybe the breathalyzer. I cannot remember offhand.
Anyway, at the end the lawyer summarized what had happened. The pro se had submitted no evidence and no argument in support of his motion. He had however effectively admitted to every point in the allegation. The whole thing took two hours.
It was fascinating watching the pro se say that:
I was a juror on a trial exactly like this. The guy had a lawyer, but he was on Vicodin and drinking and thought we might have sympathy for that. It was in the early 2000s and before the opiate crisis, but even then I think most people knew not to mix the two. I have no idea why he went to trial.
Maybe he went to trial because the Vicodin pills were prescribed by a doctor?
I concur
As long as the pills are prescribed over by a doctor you’re covered.
Entitlement. People get away with bad behavior so much that they normalize it in their heads. When they get in trouble, they rationalize it by victimizing themselves.
These are the same people who will sit in line at a restaurant for 10 minutes and not even look at the menu until it's time to order, and then they'll ask a billion questions while the line behind them groans. The same people will try to have a fellow customer fired from a store that they clearly don't work at. The same people who will rear-end you while playing on their phone and then ask why you brake-checked them.
I was a trial attorney, a long time ago. Lots of people are entitled. Even more disregard their attorney’s advice because they don’t like the advice and counsel.
But sometimes, it makes legal/statistical sense to roll the dice. It is impossible for most people to know why the current legal strategy is being used.
I don't particularly care who or what gets called first (except in-custody cases or interpreter cases should go first), but judges need to be prepared to step in and make their courtroom run more efficiently. Make people, pro-se or attorneys themselves, stop talking if they aren't addressing a reason they are in court at the present moment or they just keep circling around their point. Judges aren't passive observers, they are conduits that need to manage input from both sides of an adversarial system. When they fail to manage, we all suffer.
We get a lot of this in my municipal court - defendants always want to talk about everything and very little of it is relevant. The more experienced judges will stop them after a sentence or two to get them refocused while the less experienced judges will let them talk and talk and talk. If the judges let them talk, we're going to be in court all day.
Judges also face the problem that appellate courts are quick to overturn rulings in cases where the appellate judges feel that pro se parties were not given a lot of leeway to have their say and be heard.
Mmm are they that quick to overturn though? Not in my jurisdiction
They are in mine. And many judges won't grant summary judgment because of how often those get reversed.
I am glad that LiPs in my jurisdiction are given some latitude but not just outright allowed to totally disregard the rules. That has a dismissal as totally without merit and potentially a civil restraint order written all over it ( I have defended a very similar case! Surprised the claimant didn't try to name the insurance case handler's dog in proceedings)
Glad to know we're not the only ones having to deal with the pain in the arse that is back-to-back listing.
It's not a trolley problem, it's a triage issue. Deal with the most impending case first, then work on the others.
Which isn't what happened in this case per the OP.
Yep, just commenting on the trolley problem
It is a good example of the trolley problem though, the judge shifted the track from the one important case to the handful of unimportant ones.
Are you saying 5 people tied to a train track are unimportant?
5 throwaway cases are.
No, I'm just using the language the OP did to describe the situation.
You said it was a good example when it clearly isn't.
All other things being equal, it appears that he had time for the one 'important' case or the 5 'unimportant' cases and chose the unimportant cases. That's basically the classic trolley problem, sacrificing one for five. I'm honestly not sure which part you're hung up on. I know you think it's triaging, but it's specifically not because triaging would have prioritized the time sensitive case over the unimportant ones.
There are many big differences in the metaphor.
In the trolley one option is “inaction” and is a key point. Here the equivalent of “doing nothing” is working on a case…which by the way he did not know it would take hours. It is the equivalent of having a lever but not knowing what it does
The trolley case is an exceptional situation, but I assume that for the judge this situation is routine. I assume that a train person that would have to eventually choose between 1 vs 5 deaths would be used to always choosing 5.
Nothing is equal, that's the problem. In the trolley problem, each individual is equal to each other, all their lives are important. None of these cases are equal.
So many things are wrong in the metaphor. To start with, none was probably a life or death case.
Trolly, triage... if you squint just a little, it's the same thing.
To be pedantic, the real Trolley Problem is less about what is at stake and more about the ethical question of interfering.
If you come across the situation and no nothing it would have the same result as if you were not there.
But if you make a choice in that situation -- now you have changed things. What are the ethics of throwing the switch and -your- direct action led to a specific outcome.
Ok so I don’t have a philosophy background so maybe I got it wrong. Here’s what I was thinking. The judge had to make a choice in a zero sum situation where if she let things run their normal course there would be one outcome and if she did something else, the outcome would be different.
That sounds nothing like a Trolley problem. But if it was apparently the judge choose the multi track drifting solution.
That's not the trolley problem. Not at all.
Man, I hope you never represent me since you think this and the trolley problem are the same thing.
Gee I fucking wonder why he lost his license.
Self rep over there jumped on the trolley and cranked up the motor.
i've got to know how this turned out. did anyone get heard? did you?
We should make pro-se illegal. You get a lawyer, you can fire them for {insert giant list of reasons} and the judge picks another lawyer from the public defenders office.
This happens a maximum of 3 times.
Pro-se slows everything to a crawl.
Failing that, you get to do pro-se, OR a jury trial, not both. Lawyers get juries. You don't.
EDIT: I meant for criminal law, obviously. Civil stuff should be only pro-se. On the rich side. Balance the scales a bit.
It’s unfortunate that we are looking at rules like this to control self reps, when really the judges should be able to do that. Instead, they let self reps rule the courtroom. They can do whatever they want while the rest of us wait.
Why am I being down voted to oblivion? Wouldn't this help lawyers actually defend semi-intelligent clients who won't constantly incriminate themselves?
I've never even heard of a pro-se litigant winning.
Possibly because your proposal creates more problems than it solves.
OK, how?
Public defenders are stretched thin enough as it is. Requiring them in courts other than criminal would be a nightmare- both financially and logistically. Imagine requiring lawyers for all small claims cases! Also, if a civil defendant automatically gets a lawyer, is that fair to plaintiffs who cannot afford one? Does the state pay for the plaintiffs too? In regard to criminal court, I imagine requiring lawyers be involved when a defendant is foolhardy enough to go pro-se may actually stretch things out even more, but even if it wouldn’t, I don’t think it’s ethical or financially worthwhile to force someone to have representation.
Oh my bad, criminal only. Civil is still just you.
OP’s case is civil.
no what we should make illegal is prosecutors making deals with defendants, with the exception when the defendant becomes a witness in exchange for a deal. In theory it sounds great, but in practice is has led to a situation where people get punished for wanting a day in court by facing way higher punishments simply for refusing a deal. There never should be a situation where you get 2 years if you just agree to a deal but face 20 years when you go to court. In a situation like that even innocent people probably plead guilty if they could lose in court (even if the chance is not that high), and that is not a situation any legal system should ever create.
Because access to the court system should require having money. People without money should not have access to the court system, they should instead take things into their own hands by buying a gun and imposing frontier justice.
Said frontier justice being, err, why we have a court system instead. Because it sorta results in dead bodies if we don't?
I think too many people involved in the court system forget the entire reason they exist -- as an alternative to people buying guns and taking the law into their own hands.