New Frontiers in Alternative Dispute Resolution

Kate mentioned this story to me yesterday, and today, it’s made the New York Times:

Fed up with the inability of two lawyers to agree on a trivial issue in an insurance lawsuit, a federal judge in Florida this week ordered them to “convene at a neutral site” and “engage in one (1) game of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ ” to settle the matter.[…]

The proximate cause of Judge Presnell’s ruling, issued Tuesday, was a motion saying the two lawyers in the case could not agree about where to conduct the deposition of a witness. The choices were the building where they both work, four floors apart, or a court reporter’s office down the street.

It’s worth reading the whole story to see the different reactions of the lawyers involved.

Also, a quote from Donald Westlake seems appropriate, and will be provided below the fold:

Judge T. Wallce Higbee had come to realize that what it was all about was stupidity. All through law school and through his years of private practice, he had believed that the subject was the law itself, but in the last twelve years, since, at the age of fifty-seven, he had been elected to the bench, he had come to realize that all the training and all the experience came down to this: It was his task in life to acknowledge and then to punish stupidity. […]

Maybe, Judge Higbee told himself from time to time, maybe in big cities like New York and London there are criminal masterminds, geniuses of crime, and judges forced to shake ther heads in admiration at the subtlety and brilliance of the felonious behaviors described to them while handing down their sentences. Maybe. But out here in the world, the only crime, and it just keeps being committed over and over, is stupidity.

(From Bad News, a Dortmunder novel. It’s talking about criminal law, but it’s a nice description of a lot of what judges must go through.)