The Theory and Practice of Defending Judges Against Unjust Criticism

Having set forth the above premise and conclusion, the American Bar Association Subcommittee on Unjust Criticism of the Bench promulgated a model program for bar associations to follow when countering inaccurate or unjust criticism of judges. This article presents no quarrel with the model program but instead seeks to relate the model to an empirical account of how it might operate in practice. It must be remembered that the acid test of a theoretical model is not whether the theory is true in a purely academic sense but whether the model is useful in describing the real world. In order to test the validity of the American Bar Association ( ABA ) model, this article presents a real world account of an incident involving a prominent judge subjected to public attack by government prosecutors, a famous newspaper columnist and a powerful United States Senator. The efforts of bar associations to defend the judge disclose the extent to which the ABA model program can become a successful plan of operation