Money & the Law: Specialty courts are seen as problem solvers - Colorado Springs Gazette
This column is about specialty courts. Inspiration has come from the controversy that bubbled up out of the Beijing Olympics involving 15-year-old Russian figure skating superstar Kamila Valieva. The facts and law involved in Kamila’s case are complicated, but on Monday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport cleared her to compete in the women’s figure skating competition despite failing a pre-Games drug test.
The CAS is based in Lausanne, Switzerland, and has been around since 1984; it provides arbitration and mediation services for sports-related disputes — commercial and disciplinary. It has 300 arbitrators and mediators from 87 countries it can call on to provide services and processes something like 300 cases a year. A specialty court indeed.
Taking a wider view, the idea of specialty courts, now sometimes known as “problem-solving courts,” has been around for many years. In Colorado, the most noteworthy example is water courts. These courts exist because water law is totally weird. No one understands it other than a handful of lawyers who hold themselves out as water law experts, and there’s no way for the rest of us to know for sure if they really understand it.
In Denver, there is a separate court for probate matters, with a District Court judge who does nothing else. In El Paso County, we have a probate court, but it’s largely run by a magistrate — a judge with limited authority. If the magistrate’s authority is exceeded, the case goes to the District Court, where it gets assigned to a judge who handles probate matters and a variety of other cases.
At the federal level, examples of specialty courts include the Bankruptcy Court, which deals only with bankruptcy cases; the Tax Court, which decides disputes between taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service (of which there are many); and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
This latter court hears a mishmash of cases, including back-pay claims by civil servants, claims against the federal government for breach of contract, and claims of persons alleging injury from childhood vaccines.
Included on the list of problem-solving courts active in Colorado are courts dealing with child support, drug-related matters, domestic violence, veterans’ trauma, child dependency and neglect and driving under the influence, to name a few. Per the Colorado Judicial Branch website, as of June, there were 76 problem-solving courts active in 20 judicial districts. (Colorado has 22 judicial districts.) The Judicial Branch says these courts “seek to promote outcomes that will benefit not only the offender but the victim and society as well.”
So, are specialized tribunals a good idea? Perhaps, since the judge (or magistrate or arbitrator or administrative law judge) in charge will have a heightened ability to understand technical issues. But if what we’re looking for is fundamental fairness, is having a carefully chosen generalist at the helm a better way to go? Specialists, after all, have a tendency to analyze all things in terms of their specialty. And there are also fairness issues arising out of the sometimes arbitrary manner in which cases get assigned to specialty courts.
As a last comment on the subject of specialty courts, you should know that San Antonio has an animal court, which handles municipal animal law violations. The animals appearing in this court are not entitled to a jury of their peers.
Jim Flynn is with the Colorado Springs firm of Flynn & Wright LLC. You can contact him at [email protected].
source: https://gazette.com/business/money-the-law-specialty-courts-are-seen-as-problem-solvers/article_6d54d102-8ddf-11ec-bea0-7fb1850d96c7.html
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