Seen One, Seen All

One would have thought it only happens here, people of different races mistaking persons of the same race as looking alike. Likewise for the female gender it would seem, where male lawyers appearing before Justices Sandra Day O’Connor (first woman justice of the United States Supreme Court, who delivered the recent Singapore Academy of Law Annual Lecture) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg are concerned. The mix-up has occurred so often that it is said the two justices were given T-shirts that say, ‘I’m Ruth, not Sandra’ and vice-versa. And Justice Ginsburg was quoted saying in the Fall of 2000 that the preceding term was the first one where no one appearing before her had mistaken her for her colleague. ‘That, to me, is a sign that we’ve really made it.’

The Midnight Shift

If lawyers here think they have it bad having to attend Night Court after office hours, welcome to what is known as the Lobster Shift in the Criminal Court of lower Manhattan.

Past midnight, whilst the rest of the law offices around it are in slumberland, the Lobster Shift — the unofficial name given to the 1am to 9am arraignment session run by Manhattan’s criminal court system, Thursday through Saturday night — has just begun. It is held in a brightly lit court house and yes, a judge presides over the proceedings and has been doing so for more than 30 years, the busiest period being in the 1980s at the height of the cocaine epidemic.

As for the lawyers, the prosecutor is usually a young lawyer from the District Attorney’s office, with newly-hired Assistant District Attorneys doing at least one three-day rotation on the Lobster in his or her first two years. They are normally opposed by one of several Legal Aid Society attorneys who act for almost all the defendants. Like prosecutors, the judges work the Lobster three days in a row, but draw one shift every two years or so.

And why the reference to lobsters? Probably in reference to the nocturnal hours when lobstermen traditionally set their traps.

Food for thought indeed!

Members of the Family Law Practice Committee recently had a chance to network with practitioners from Down Under and exchange views on practice matters with three family lawyers from Perth, over tea and cookies. Visitors were also given a tour of our premises. And when one of the Committee’s Vice-Chairpersons heard our foreign guests had a flight to catch later, she gamely offered to give them a ride to their hotel or the airport in her kiddie-friendly space wagon, to ensure that they did not miss their flight, proving that when it comes to warm hospitality, mother knows best after all!

So goes the song, but not if some litigants can help it. Dozens of elite high altitude mountaineers in the United States have sued to limit the number of permits issued to ‘novelty’ climbers seeking to ascend Mount Everest.

This group, who make a living writing best-selling memoirs about mountain-climbing, allege that such ‘oddities’ as a blind man, a 64-year old man and a teenager, seen scaling the peak in the 2001 climbing season, materially dilute their ability to earn a living.

Their grouse: ‘These people are making the mountain into a molehill!’