With its wheels of frustration, justice plods on

If you put the wheels of justice on your car, you’d stall on the interstate entrance ramp and get rear-ended by common sense.

Yes, I’m saying they grind slowly. I’m not a court reporter, so I don’t have to step into the legal mill too often, but when I do – as I did Friday – I’m frequently as stunned as I am stumped.

Actually, I’m not sure it’s fair to say our judicial system is “slow.” Judges can sometimes cruise through a docket of diverse cases with the efficiency of a kid chomping Cracker Jack. Maybe the problem is the sheer volume of adjudication they must mete out.

But when a hearing slated for 10 a.m. isn’t even on a judge’s radar by lunch time, you wonder why they pattern their scheduling after your family doctor’s plan. You know, come in promptly for a 9 a.m. appointment to see a waiting room full of sick people who will be called before you are.

I stayed in “courtroom 1” of our magnificently ornate county courthouse for 30 minutes or so - watching the judge sentence, continue and otherwise rule - before I had to leave. Why? Our court reporter was there and able to stay, and I had another hearing to go to.

That hearing was slated for noon in a different building. It started late, but still managed to be finished before the 10 a.m. hearing had begun.

Here’s the catch: There was no noon hearing. Even so, it took a good 20 minutes for the non-hearing to end.

A bewildering court scene

I wrote about this for Saturday’s paper, so you may know the basics. Two school districts switched how they get teacher health insurance coverage. The union said they can’t do that without union approval. On Thursday, the union asked for an injunction and the judge granted it, blocking the insurance change until he could hold a hearing. Because the insurance switch had to be done by Saturday, the judge schedules the hearing for Friday.

For some reason, the attorneys working for the district filed an appeal on Thursday in an attempt to get the temporary injunction overturned. I’m no lawyer, but wasn’t the whole point of Friday’s hearing to give them a chance to get the injunction lifted? Why file an appeal before the hearing? If, at the hearing, they persuaded the judge to lift the injunction, they won. If they didn’t convince him, then you appeal, no?

But here’s where we fell through the looking glass. The judge immediately decided that, because they had appealed his injunction, he had no jurisdiction in the case until another judge ruled on that appeal. It was brilliant, and logical, legal jiu jitsu. Judge grips case, lawyers challenge judge’s grip. Judge says that means he can’t change his grip until the challenge is settled.

Attorneys for both sides looked a bit baffled. District lawyers took a few futile stabs at convincing the judge to hold the hearing anyway. They went in the hallway and talked long enough for the judge and the union attorney to trade a handful of quips and an anecdote or two. They came back in and had a little sidebar with the judge.

Then they said they would not withdraw the appeal, and the judge said fine, but that means there can be no hearing and that the injunction stands.

It felt like watching a team of lawyers tackle themselves in a football game while the opposition stared in bewilderment.

The wheels of justice can grind not only slowly but unevenly. And that leaves behind pieces that you can’t quite fit together.