To a normal person, sure. But the legal system ruins lives and deals in ruined lives every day. They don't blink twice at that stuff. A cartoon dragon on the other hand...
I remember reading a couple years back, when some judges in Louisiana were exposed systematically discarding legal petitions from incarcerated plaintiffs into trash cans, without reading them. Totally nulled out any access to courts, any possibility of justice, for thousands of people.
Judges in PA were just selling kids to private prisons.
"Ciavarella disposed thousands of children to extended stays in youth centers for offenses as trivial as mocking an assistant principal on Myspace or trespassing in a vacant building.[3] After a judge rejected an initial plea agreement in 2009,[4][5] a federal grand jury returned a 48-count indictment.[6] In 2010, Conahan pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison.[7] Ciavarella opted to go to trial the following year. He was convicted on 12 of 39 counts and sentenced to 28 years in federal prison.[8] Conahan, who had been released to home confinement in 2020, had his sentence (due to end in 2026) commuted in 2024 by President Joe Biden."
Thousands of innocent kids in cages, and Mr. Biden actually pardoned that judge as a "nonviolent offender". I think I'll never forget that particular pardon, the obscenity of it. It, just, inverts the ideals behind the reform movements, turns them upside-down in mockery.
His constituents petitioned him about the crooked jails, and... Biden heard them; and freed the jailer.
He was already on house arrest and was going to be free of that by 2026.
The willingness to take the optics hit to allow him a little more freedom, a little earlier makes me question what everyone else is leadership is doing, they must really relate to him.
Pardons like that one really fuel the conspiracy theories about how many executive actions in the Biden admin, particularly toward the end, were really carried out by the former President.
This is really important to understand. Formality isn't an arbitrary concept invented by old fogies, it's a psychological hack we apply to convince people to take things seriously. People really like joking around [citation needed], so that's hard to achieve. A lot of people develop weird complexes about it, because there are big gaps between otherwise close subcultures in what should or shouldn't be taken seriously, but I hope nearly everyone can agree that court proceedings are a serious matter.
The watermark is actively distracting from the enormously important work of reading the complaint in detail. This isn't a question of formality for formality's sake, it's a question of ensuring that the processes run smoothly so that justice can be done.
If he studied enough for law school and was able to work in a court for years before becoming a judge, I would assume his ADHD is under control and he is not that easily distracted.
and since HN is less serious than a court, when I write a comment to you here, surely you agree that there is no justifiable reason the people that run this site should not allow me to purple-dragon-watermark my comments. what's the matter with you paul/dang, don't have your adhd under control?
Consciously, sure, but with some studies saying judges tend to rule differently on similar cases based on whether it's before or after lunchtime, do you really want to introduce more subliminal variables like decorations into the legal process?
The "hungry judge" finding did not replicate [0], and the original paper had serious methodological flaws, namely, that prisoners with parole hearings later in the day were more likely to have either overworked "shared counsel" (the Israeli equivalent of public defenders) or no counsel at all [1]. You should consider the hungry judge effect another debunked victim of the replication crisis.
The influence of cartoon dragons probably don't come close the influence of judges and lawyers talking to each other about what schools they went to, what country clubs they belong to, etc.
The breech of formality isn't being turned into a big deal because it might bias case outcomes; in that regard it's a rounding error washed out by innumerable more substantial sources of bias. It's being made into a big deal because formality is the wall between outcomes of cases and feelings of personal culpability for the people who are involved in that process. All of the formality and decorum make it easier for judges and lawyers to emotionally distance themselves from, very often, ruining peoples' lives.
Too many "rounding errors" adding up seems like a reasonable justification for not allowing even seemingly small sources of additional inconsistency. Slippery slope and all that.
Also, just because the other potential sources of bias you brought up exist doesn't mean new ones should be let into the process. I wouldn't be against solutions to remove the ones you mentioned. But I don't think you'd be entirely convinced that just allowing cartoon dragons would decrease bias by making people more empathetic.
Do you know for a fact that those rounding errors add up, or do they cancel out? I feel like all this bikeshedding is just helping to draw the attention off the more significant and well known biases.
Do you know for a fact that the rounding errors cancel out perfectly? Probably not.
Trying to make this about "more significant and well known biases" when all I'm arguing for is not introducing additional biases is a logical fallacy. And allowing cartoon watermarks in court documents would not help with the "more significant and well known biases" that you're more concerned about, anyway, so I have to wonder why you feel strongly enough that this should be allowed that you'd write off opposition as "bikeshedding."
Formality is about preserving objectivity. You don't submit papers to a peer-reviewed journal watermarked with a purple dinosaur in a suit for the same reason you don't submit a complaint to a court watermarked with a purple dinosaur in a suit. Scientific publication (despite its many flaws) is about the content of the publication. Everything else - tone, style, grammatical nuance - is prescribed by a style guide because it is otherwise irrelevant.
There are certainly bad judges that hide behind "the authority vested in them by the court," but reductively asserting that formality is about maintaining authority misses the point (and the operating philosophy behind creating a fair and impartial court) by a country mile.
