Former Judge Quits Bar Assoc In USA Because He Gets Told Off For Not Writing A Nice Enough Column

Cincinnati.com has this great report about a judge who actually thought about judgements and the way they were written. It appears fellow bench members and the bar association weren’t to happy about his plain speaking….

 

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/politics/2015/03/25/painter-quits-bar-association-told-nicer/70437656/

 

Former Judge Mark Painter never has been at a loss for words, especially when it comes to singling out lousy writing by his fellow lawyers.

But for the first time in years, his criticism has been silenced. Sort of.

The Cincinnati Bar Association recently refused to print Painter’s column on legal writing in its monthly magazine, prompting Painter to quit the association and take out a big ad in The Enquirer on Wednesday complaining about the decision. The problem, the association’s leadership told Painter, was that his critiques of local judges sometimes were not all that collegial.

In other words, he’s too mean.

Painter, who enjoys a good fight almost as much as good writing, said the real problem is censorship and wasted no time Wednesday making his case. He said his columns in the CBA Report were intended to educate, not embarrass, and the bar association went overboard by censoring him.

“You’ve got a bureaucratic mindset, a don’t-rock-the-boat mindset,” Painter said of the bar association. “It’s ridiculous. Mine is an opinion column. It’s amazing how thin-skinned people are.”

Officials at the bar association, the region’s largest organization for lawyers, declined comment on their decision, other than to say they appreciate Painter’s contributions over the years and regret his decision to drop his membership.

“Engaging in a public debate with him at this point wouldn’t be productive,” said John Norwine, the bar association’s director.

The association did, however, spell out its concerns about the columns in an email to Painter in January. The group’s director of communications, Laura Gaffin, told him his examples of poor writing shouldn’t pick on local judges.

“Unfortunately, we won’t be able to print your most recent submission,” she wrote. “If you would like to rework to include national or other area examples that do not include our local bench, we would be happy to consider it at that time,”

The email makes no mention of specific judges who have complained about Painter’s columns, but there are plenty of possibilities out there. Over the course of his 30-year career as a municipal and appeals court judge, Painter has irritated more than a few of his fellow jurists.

Several judges grumbled about Painter’s rulings while he served on the Ohio 1st District Court of Appeals, which sometimes overrules judges after finding they made mistakes. Appeals courts usually are gentle in their handling of judges, even when they overturn their decisions, but Painter’s opinions carried more of a wallop.

Some thought Painter maybe enjoyed his work too much.

In one written opinion, he likened a local judge to a hanging judge from the Old West while criticizing a tough prison sentence. In others, he quoted Humpty, Dumpty and dropped in pop culture references to movies, such as “Office Space,” and a comedian known as “Tater Salad.”

Painter said he did it all in the interest of clarity, and because he wants lawyers to write more for the general public than for each other. He became a traveling evangelist for the Plain English Movement, which urges lawyers and judges to write more clearly, to use shorter sentences and to use footnotes instead of long case citations that gum up an otherwise fine sentence.

“Talking about legal writing is pretty easy because you’re never at a loss for examples of bad writing,” Painter said. “It’s always there.”

Just this month, he said, someone sent him a magistrate’s decision from Lorain County, Ohio, that included a 356-word sentence. “The longest sentence I’ve ever seen,” Painter said.

He isn’t sure why his most recent column was the one that put him over the edge with the bar association, since it didn’t mention a specific local case and called out the Ohio Supreme Court, not a local judge, for offenses against the English language. It also referred to The Enquirer as “the daily pamphlet” and poked fun at celebrities for overwrought divorce announcements.

Painter said he also, sometimes, cites examples of good writing by judges from here and elsewhere. He’s not an unreasonable guy, he said.

He even cut Gaffin some slack when she misspelled “collegial” in her email rejecting his column.

“I’m sure it was just a typo,” Painter said.