"Shovel brigade"

Judging Crimes has some good reflections prompted by the recent NY Times series on small-town justice:

There's a disillusioning moment in every young lawyer's life. It happens when she stands at the podium, and clinches her argument with an unanswerable point, and looks up at the imposing figure in the black robe, and there's no light in the judge's eyes, just the blank impassive stare of the diplomat waiting for the translation through his headphones...

In my experience, the worst appellate judges tend to be highly successful lawyers who retire into a prestigious judgeship as the capstone of a career...

When those lawyers become appellate judges at an advanced age, and are asked to decide their first criminal cases, they begin with the assumption that any field so dominated by sub-optimal lawyers needs the touch of a high-class professional to set things right. So you get ignorant, sweeping decisions intended to tidy things up...

In my experience, you can find this at the trial court level too.