J-Law 46 — The Weekly Public Q&A With Rotating Judges

A weekly community Q&A session shall be held over video, rotating through different judges, where the public may ask general questions about the process that cannot be learned from any book and are not specific to any case.

An entire category of essential knowledge exists nowhere in print. How long does a judge actually spend reading a motion? How many minutes will a litigant realistically get to speak at a hearing? What should a person do when a judge rules on a contested matter at a status conference without warning? Practitioners learn the answers through years inside the building and share them with each other over lunch. Everyone else litigates blind.

Public officials in every other branch answer public questions as a matter of routine — town halls, school-board meetings, agency comment sessions. Judges alone communicate exclusively through rulings and expect the public to navigate their processes unaided. A weekly rotating video Q&A, limited to general process questions, breaks the information monopoly at trivial cost: one hour, one judge, one camera. Demystifying the courts serves every honest participant in them.

The expected counterargument: judicial ethics forbid commenting on cases, and public sessions will devolve into complaints about pending matters. The law is drafted around the concern — questions must be general, about process, and specific to no case, a boundary the presiding judge can enforce in real time the way judges enforce boundaries all day. Ethics rules restrict case commentary and have never restricted explaining how the system works; judges give exactly these explanations at bar functions, law schools, and continuing-education panels constantly, to audiences of insiders. The objection thus reduces to a claim about which audiences deserve the explanations, and the current answer — lawyers yes, public no — is the information monopoly stated as policy. An hour a week, rotated across an entire bench, asks each judge for a few hours a year. The mystery has only ever served the insiders, and an institution that will explain itself to everyone except the people it judges has chosen its constituency out loud.