D.C. judge has sharp words for some lawyers

Jurist says he feels obligated to help them meet high standards

The National Law Journal

December 10, 2012

Ridiculous. Baseless. Dilatory. Wasteful. Disingenuous.

Those were just a few of the choice words U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth recently had for District of Columbia government lawyers. They had violated a discovery order, he said in an Oct. 4 opinion, and in trying to defend their actions, they were asking him to enter an "Orwellian world" where "all arguments are devoid of context."

To the city's lawyers, Lamberth had gone too far. They asked him to strike the "vituperative rhetoric"— but the judge scoffed. "The Federal Rules provide for no motions for reconsideration for hurt feelings, no motions to strike things that could make you look bad," he wrote on Nov. 19.

In 25 years on the bench, it wasn't the first time Lamberth faced pushback from lawyers over his language. In 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit removed Lamberth from a case in part because of strong words that prompted objections from the U.S. Department of Justice. Lamberth doesn't "sugarcoat things," said Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft partner Kenneth Wainstein.

"As a government attorney and as a judge he's always called it as he sees it," said Wainstein, noting Lamberth can be especially demanding of government lawyers. "I think that springs from his strong belief in right and wrong and making sure that everybody gets a fair shake."

Lamberth, a D.C. federal judge since 1987 and chief judge since 2008, declined to discuss his approach to writing opinions or his style. But he did say he thought the court should expect lawyers to perform at a high level "and not just wink or overlook or ignore conduct that falls short."

Federal judges are often required to be critical and disciplinary action over language is rare, said Cynthia Gray, director of the American Judicature Society Center for Judicial Ethics, in an email. Judges are required to be patient and dignified, she said, but "second-guessing a judge's decision on how strongly he or she needs to express himself or herself to get the job done is inconsistent with the discretion granted judges."

Known for his outspokenness on the bench and in person, Lamberth ran the civil division of the local U.S. attorney's office before being nominated. "He was a fantastic manager and a very fine writer," said former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, now with diGenova & Toensing. "The material that used to come from the civil division to us in the front office was always superb, from top to bottom."

After his appointment in 1987, news archives showed Lamberth was drawing attention for his writing by the early 1990s. In a 1992 article in Legal Times, a lawyer described one of his rulings as "sort of harsh in its language."

But it was his handling of litigation over the U.S. Department of the Interior's mismanagement of government trust funds for Native Americans that got him in trouble. In a July 2005 opinion he called the Interior Department, among other things, "a dinosaur—the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago." The Justice Department successfully appealed to have Lamberth removed, pointing to the July ruling and a string of reversals.