J-Law 38 — Transparent Judicial Expectations

Each judge shall publish, in plain language, their specific procedural expectations — filing deadlines, response times, hearing practices, formatting preferences, and courtroom protocols. No litigant shall be penalized for failing to meet unpublished expectations.

A body of secret law governs every American courtroom. Beyond the statutes and published rules lies each judge's personal layer — how courtesy copies must arrive, when the judge actually reads motions, which formatting quirks cause filings to be set aside, what may and may not be raised at a status conference. None of it appears in any book. Attorneys acquire it through years of appearances and courthouse relationships; the self-represented discover each expectation by violating it and paying the penalty.

Due process has always required fair notice: government may punish only conduct it first defined and disclosed. An unpublished expectation enforced with real consequences is a secret rule, and secret rules are the signature of arbitrary power everywhere they appear. Publication costs a judge an afternoon of writing and costs the insiders their quiet advantage. Any expectation a judge is unwilling to publish is an expectation no litigant should ever have been penalized for missing.

The expected counterargument: judges need flexibility, and publishing expectations freezes practices that legitimately vary case to case. Publication and flexibility coexist everywhere else government operates — agencies publish rules and amend them, employers publish policies and update them, and a judge can revise a published expectations page in five minutes. What the objection actually defends is the option to hold litigants to standards those litigants were never told existed, and flexibility of that kind has a plainer name. The law's penalty clause targets it precisely: expectations may vary, may evolve, and may be tailored, and none of them may be enforced against a person who had no way to know them. A judge unwilling to write down what the judge intends to punish has conceded that the punishment cannot survive being written down.