It'd be a lot of fun to be a judge

There was some sissy legal hullabaloo last week about the judge last week who led off his dissent with "I concede that this short opinion of mine does not consider or take into account the majority opinion. So I should disclose at the outset that I have not read it."

Hey, you and me both buddy. It would be hypocritical of any student to decry Jacobs for not reading one mf opinion, right? But still, when we omit reading assignments, we sit in the back and hope to baby Jebus that our ignorance doesn't become the new subject of class discussion. To say: I dissent from your opinion, and I don't even know what you said, is a pretty $$$ way to lead off.

It really does get better though. The case was about college students who were pissed because many years ago at their institution an election was run and re-run, because the college president found out that somehow the student newspaper was commandeered and that messed up the election. What Jacobs wrote after his line about not reading the majority opinion is even better:

This is a case about nothing. Injunctive relief from the school’s election rules is now moot (if it was ever viable); and plaintiffs’ counsel conceded at oral argument that the only relief sought in this litigation is nominal damages. Now, after years of litigation over two dollars, the majority will impose on a busy judge to conduct a trial on this silly thing, and require a panel of jurors to set aside their more important duties of family and business in order to decide it. See Amato v. City of Saratoga Springs, 170 F.3d 311, 322-23 (2d Cir. 1999) (Jacobs, J., concurring) (noting that a trial over one dollar is a “wasteful imposition on the trial judge and on the taxpayers and veniremen”).

With due respect to my colleagues in the majority, and to whatever compulsion they feel to expend substantial energies on this case, I fear that the majority opinion (44 pages of typescript) will only feed the plaintiffs’ fantasy of oppression: that plutocrats are trying to stifle an upsurge of Pol-Potism on Staten Island. Contrary to the impression created by the majority’s lengthy formal opinion, this case is not a cause célèbre; it is a slow-motion tantrum by children spending their graduate years trying to humiliate the school that conferred on them a costly education from which they evidently derived small benefit. A selection from the illiterate piffle in the disputed issue of the College Voice is set out in the margin for the reader’s fun.

Basically, Jacobs ordered a whole fleet of whambulances for the plaintiffs, which should probably be the disposition of more cases these days.