Justices Reinstate Suit, Rebuke Trial Judge

A federal appeals court in San Francisco reinstated a personal injury lawsuit against the Union Pacific railroad Wednesday, sharply criticizing a former Los Angeles federal District Court trial judge for the manner in which he had dismissed the case.

In an 11-0 ruling, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said Judge James M. Ideman, who is serving temporarily as a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, failed to meet his judicial obligations because he had his law clerk preside at the final pretrial conference in the case and then dismissed the suit without a hearing. Moreover, some of the appellate judges slammed him for the lack of any official record of the conference and they suggested that he may have deliberately tried to keep the session a secret.

“This is a unique case,” wrote Circuit Judge Pamela A. Rymer. “Suffice it to say that where, as here, the district judge allows his law clerk to conduct the final pretrial conference, declines to give counsel an opportunity to be heard before the court, and then dismisses the action [on his own motion] with prejudice, we cannot let the dismissal stand.”

Circuit Judges A. Wallace Tashima and Kim M. Wardlaw, both of whom served with Ideman on the federal district court in Los Angeles, issued an even more stinging, concurring opinion, saying that Ideman had held the pretrial session in a secretive manner.

Tashima and Wardlaw stressed that a law clerk has no authority to conduct a judicial proceeding such as a pretrial conference. Then, they added: “Judge Ideman must have been aware of these strictures because he appears to have taken steps to ensure that the pretrial conference did not become a matter of record. There is no entry on the docket [the official record sheet] of this case, no clerk’s minute order that a pretrial conference was ever held. Nor, contrary to the requirement of the Court Reporters Act, which requires all proceedings of the district court to ‘be recorded verbatim’ . . . were the pretrial conference proceedings reported by a court reporter or recorded verbatim in any other way.”

“Yet, in spite of the sub rosa nature of the pretrial conference,” they wrote, Ideman imposed the ultimate sanction on plaintiff Philip Sanders, who had sued over a back injury--dismissal of his case with prejudice.

Ideman, who is presiding over the bombing conspiracy trial of former Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson, would not comment on the ruling.

Ideman was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 after serving as deputy district attorney and a Superior Court judge in Los Angeles. He resigned from the federal bench late last year and is serving as a Superior Court judge on temporary assignment in Los Angeles.

It is highly unusual for federal judges to upbraid another judge in this fashion and to refer to a lower court judge by name in an opinion.

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the ruling “shows that there are limits to a federal judge’s power, especially the power to delegate his work.” Levenson, a former federal prosecutor, added: “They are sending a strong message to the judges that they need to do their own work.”

Charlotte Costan, a Burbank attorney who successfully represented the plaintiff on appeal, said that in 15 years as an appellate specialist, she had never encountered a similar situation. Tuesday’s ruling reversed an earlier 2-1 decision by a smaller panel of 9th Circuit judges. In that instance, Circuit Judge Andrew Kleinfeld said that “due to the almost total failure” of Sanders’ lawyer at the time to comply with pretrial orders, Ideman’s decision to dismiss the case was not an abuse of discretion.

In Tuesday’s decision, Rymer said that Sanders’ trial attorney clearly was unprepared for the pretrial conference and had been derelict in his duty. Normally, she said, when a trial court “exercises its own discretion in a deliberate, informed and reasonable way, we would accord it considerable deference. But we cannot see how any deference is warranted in these circumstances.”

Tashima and Wardlaw said it appeared that utilizing a law clerk “was the customary manner in which Judge Ideman conducted his pretrial conferences.”