J-Law 18 — The Judicial Competency Challenge

Any litigant whose motion is denied may pose three legal questions, directly relevant to that motion, to the presiding judge. If the judge cannot correctly answer all three, the ruling is automatically vacated.

Every litigant who has watched a judge deny a motion within seconds of the hearing's start, without a single question, without engaging one argument, has confronted the same suspicion: the motion was never read. Nothing in the current system lets that suspicion be tested. The denial stands whether it emerged from careful study or from total indifference, and the litigant is left to pursue correction — at enormous cost — of a decision that may rest on nothing.

This law creates the test. Three questions, drawn directly from the motion just denied, answered correctly by anyone who actually engaged its substance. A judge who did the work passes in minutes and loses nothing. A judge who cannot answer basic questions about a ruling they just issued has demonstrated, on the record, that the ruling reflects no understanding of the matter it decides — and a decision made without understanding has no legitimate claim to stand. Competence is the least the parties are owed from the person deciding their fate.

The expected counterargument: litigants will craft trick questions, and rulings will be vacated over trivia rather than substance. The law's text forecloses the tactic — questions must be directly relevant to the denied motion, and relevance is a determination courts make constantly. A question the motion itself fairly raises is a question the deciding judge should be able to answer; a question outside the motion fails the relevance requirement and never counts. The scenario the objection fears, examined closely, is a judge who genuinely engaged a motion yet cannot answer three relevant questions about it, and that scenario describes a contradiction. Judges quiz attorneys from the bench daily and treat inability to answer as disqualifying. The challenge merely turns the practice around, and the discomfort it provokes measures how rarely the bench expects to be examined on its own work.