She continued to do her work as she saw fit. Three weeks later, she received a third summons from the Presiding Judge.
The judge said, “I’m not going behind your back, so I’m telling you now that I just added you and your job to the agenda for the next judges’ meeting. I haven’t decided how to present it, but I’ll strongly recommend your termination.”
“I might say something like, ‘She’s so over-qualified that she’s unqualified. I like you, and I care about you. I don’t know if you’ll find work in Santa Barbara. There’s no demand for a traffic lawyer. In a community this size, there is no call for the kind of legal work you did in San Francisco…”
The Commissioner interrupted. “You sound like a doctor delivering a diagnosis for which there is no treatment. Tell me exactly why I’m getting the boot. I’d like to hear the truth rather than clever political double talk.”
The Presiding Judge said, “What don’t you understand? I warned you twice. There have been the usual citizen-defendant complaints against you. There’s a virulent one from a guy called Van Valen; it was just a parking ticket, and he’s a lawyer. What did you do to him.”
“Oh, Van Valen! It was my disposition of his wife’s case that put a burr under his saddle.”
“So, what did you do to her…or him?”
“He didn’t have one ticket. He had eleven – all at the same place. He parked by a curb where the green paint was faded and the signage might be confusing to some – one time. But his defense was vitiated by the fact that he parked there at least the eleven times he got a ticket.
“When he parked for more than 15 minutes in the designated zone, he was told by means of the ticket that his parking was illegal. His defense was a complete failure, and he didn’t help himself by being the most obnoxious and the most offensive person to appear in my courtroom.”
“Guilty?”
“Oh, yes. On all eleven and a full fine on each.”
“Did the fact that he was obnoxious and offensive help you find him guilty?”
“It might be empirically true. But his behavior in the courtroom wasn’t a conscious part of my decision. It never has been.
“But then there’s the study of the Louisiana juvenile court judges who had undergraduate degrees from LSU. They gave harsher sentences when LSU was favored to win, but then lost, a big football game. It’s disturbing but not surprising.
“I suspect those judges were appalled when they read the study, not because they had been caught, but because they didn’t intend to do what the statistical analysis demonstrated.”
The Presiding Judge wasn’t interested in a study of juvenile courts in Louisiana. “What about the wife?”
“She did the same thing at the same place — once.”
“What did you do?”
“I dismissed the citation.”
The judge paused to think, “So, he puts up a big defense full of sound and fury — and loses. Let me guess: the wife says nothing, but you recognize the name and the location of the violation. You know the defense for a single incident, and you dismiss her ticket without a trial.”
The Commissioner said, “Yes, exactly.”
The Presiding Judge said, “That could have set him off.”
The Commissioner said, “I could only hope. But this is a digression. I’m not getting fired because of Van Valen … am I?”
“No, you’re not. We — the other judges and I — ignore citizen-defendant complaints, especially if they come from lawyers. But we cannot ignore complaints from the cops. It started with the city Police Department.
“Since our last meeting, the Undersheriff came in to say she’s tired of your insinuation that her deputies are liars. The police chief has some statistical material. The Undersheriff may be doing nothing but drafting behind the Chief. At any rate, they’re both on the same ride, and it’s against you.
“They’ve thrown down the gauntlet. Unless I get rid of you, they’ll run a law and order candidate against me with the public and financial support of both the Police Officers Association and the Deputy Sheriffs Association.
“The system can probably absorb one hard right-wing judge, but once law enforcement gets the taste of running a judge out of office, they go on the lookout for vulnerable judges they don’t like. It wouldn’t take long to change the overall character of our community.”
The Commissioner said, “Hmm, I see. By finding drivers not guilty of traffic offenses the citing officer can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt, I’ve been threatening the liberal atmosphere of this community?”
The Presiding Judge replied, “I don’t know about that tone, but your actual words fairly summarize what I just said.”
The Commissioner said, “At first I thought it was a craven, a cowardly surrender to political pressure. But you’ve explained that I’m being sacrificed for the good of the community. I wonder if you’ve thought of this: Since I live here, I’m actually benefiting from my own ouster. What a silver lining.”
She continued, “But I also realize how much you like your job, Linda. You’re a judge who enjoys judging people. You like to manipulate the other judges. Linda. You love the power and, given the erratic nature of your husband’s work, you need the income.
“For a moment I thought you were firing me for doing what I am sworn to do, just so you can keep your own job, or at least keep it without the inconvenience of running for election.”
The Presiding Judge was caught off guard. She had never heard the Commissioner speak this way. The best she could come up with was, “You’ve had three happy years, and it’s because of me. You’re supposed to be so good at everything — everything I guess but gratitude.”
The Commissioner said, “I’ve heard you say more than once or twice that judges of conscience have to be ready to lose their position at any moment. You can go to work, make a principled decision, and before you know it, you have a lot of people who hate your guts and you can’t continue in office — the Rose Bird effect.
“Whatever the police say about me, they are complaining about principled decisions they don’t like. I stand behind every decision I’ve made, but I don’t claim to be right 100 percent of the time.
“But you know, Linda, that if there were an impartial evaluation of my work, it would stand up well — very well. So, Linda, you know (or you could find out) that what I’m doing is right. How can you make a principled decision to fire me?”
The judge was ready for this: “You missed an essential aspect of my defense of principled decisions. I’m ready to fall on my sword to maintain my principles, but I’m not losing my job in the defense of your principles. Your principles — your job. Easy peasy.”
On her way out of chambers the Commissioner said, “Easy peasy. Linda, those are words for you to live by.”
Hell.
This was bad.
She finessed all academic challenges by working hard on the subjects that were easy for her — and that was almost all of them.
She graduated from a top law school and the highly-paid work she could do well found her; she didn’t have to look. She confronted employee-inequities affecting a job she had had for six years by making a precipitous, public and courageous decision to resign.
At age 12, her nephew Mungo suffered from a failure to thrive and had a dangerously bad attitude toward everyone but her. She fixed him by ignoring sound state and federal statues and scared him straight by pushing him out of an airplane (she followed; they were both equipped with parachutes).
After 15 years of suffering from the insidious effects of sexual harassment in high school, she used the revulsion she experienced while watching Brent Cavanaugh testify to motivate herself to confront her tormentors. She contacted each of the three arrogant and entitled men.
She felt liberated from the past by talking to each about the effect his action had had on her life.
She didn’t condemn or blame, and she didn’t expect to change them. But she asked each of them a different question he could not immediately answer — a question that would stimulate cognitive dissonance that would disturb him for years to come.
Confronted with the cost of Santa Barbara real estate, she returned a call from the Managing Partner at her former firm and accepted as severance pay a check more than enough to admit her to the part of market where she wanted to shop.
Six years out of law school and one of the most gifted lawyers in the country, and she was unemployed. She accepted a job for which she was vastly over-qualified, a job at which she could not fail.
Before she could be underwhelmed by this job, she committed to Steve, made his dream her own and bore him their children. Theirs was to be a carefully planned life of meaning and purpose. The plan depended on her job.
Jobs come with bosses
To do a job well, you have to do what the boss wants you to do. And she wouldn’t.
She was born with a spectacular hand to play out over her life. So was Steve. Each believed their gifts came with a responsibility that went to the core of their being. To have so much at birth was burdensome. They were careful in the way they sought to exploit their gifts to benefit others.
They played it safe. At least she played it safe by taking a job with a decent income, and no stress, so she could she could dedicate her best energy to raising their children and supporting her husband and his dream. She folded his dream into her big picture.
In spite of all she had, she couldn’t do the job on which she and Steve had built their lives. She was the Best Girl in our class. She had planned for and was living a life where her talent supported her own children and her husband, plus all the children to benefit from Steve’s grand project.
That was her big picture, and it was falling apart. She couldn’t keep her job, and she didn’t know if there was anything she could do about it.
She needed some solace. Her parents experienced her problems as their own, which tripled the burden on her.
Her older sister had been her teacher, her guide, her protector. She was still her mentor and had a standing membership in any epistemic community she assembled when she needed an answer or solution she couldn’t find by herself.
Even though Mungo was a changed boy — changed for the better — almost immediately after she pushed him out of the airplane, the incident had taken a toll on her sister, Mungo’s mother, and their relationship was still brittle.
That left her Uncle Bruce. He loved her unconditionally and would always be on her side, even when there wasn’t a side to take. He’d be with her right or wrong, and if given a choice, he’d go for the wrong.
Of course, Uncle Bruce was a little bit crazy, but he was also the living repository of the Aphorisms recording the family’s collected wisdom.
All families attempt to distill wisdom from experience, so it can be passed on from one generation to the next. This contributes to the creation of a family’s common values and beliefs. The communication of family wisdom can be explicit: Stand up straight.
It can be modeled and communicated by example. It is often communicated, and frequently miscommunicated, by implication.
Family wisdom is a source of all kinds of implicit bias, which have both positive and negative effects. Family wisdom isn’t always wise.
She believed she was fortunate to have some of her family’s beliefs articulated as aphorisms. She had heard them so many times that she knew what most of her relatives would say about nearly everything without having to ask.
She knew what Uncle Bruce would say to comfort her because she had heard him say it so often:
Even the brightest lights fail
That was what he’d say. No question about it. It wasn’t comforting. It wasn’t wise. She once looked for its origin and couldn’t find it. She wasn’t sure what it was supposed to mean. It was perverse. It was sufficiently perverse to be ridiculous and ridiculous enough to be kind of funny.
Neither she nor her life nor her predicament was funny. But they were somehow funny, because she felt something funny about all three. She believed in her big picture. It was serious — nearly sacred. It was what guided her life — and there was absolutely nothing funny about it.
So, it must be part of a bigger picture, large enough to include the perverse, the ridiculous and the humor. It was a bigger picture that had yet to come into her focus.
— Brian Burke is a certified family law specialist practicing family law and mediation in Santa Barbara. A researcher and educator in the field of divorce and family conflicts, he also is the creator of the Legal Road Map™. Click here for more information, call 805.965.2888 or e-mail brian@burkefamilylaw.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.