When I moved into my role as columnist of The Litigation Daily back in July, one question dominated my thinking and reporting: How are courts going to keep their docket moving during the middle of a pandemic that makes coming together to hold court as we have in the past a public health hazard?

After a half a year and a dozen conversations with jurists across the country, I still have plenty of lingering questions about how the pandemic has changed the people sitting in jury boxes, how courts—and state courts in particular—will navigate mounting backlogs, and whether lawyers will ever be hopping on planes to criss-cross the country for routine hearings again. I’m hoping the “Holding Court” series that I dreamed up in my early day on the Lit Daily beat has offered you all a real time snapshot of how judges are approaching the unprecedented and unpredictable problems presented by the pandemic. Here they all are collected in one place, with a nugget from each I found particularly interesting.


Judge Richard Gottlieb in North Carolina. (Photo: Courtesy Photo) Judge Richard Gottlieb