Asymmetrical Information

That's one way to deal with a backlog - wait until the plaintiff dies....

Funny, the two cases I've had in front of Judge Daniels, he ruled from the bench. And one of those was a motion to dismiss a class action complaint. For what it's worth, he strikes me as a thoughtful guy. Anyway, delay is the norm in the SDNY, not the exception, due to the collision of high caseloads, huge and complex motions, and criminal dockets that have a constitutional obligation to move civil cases to the end of the line. (I've got one case pending now, I won't say where, in which I've waited over three years for a decision on a motion to dismiss).

One should not expect quick decisions in either the DDC and SDNY.

Crank -- SD Fla used to have the same problem with criminal cases squeezing out civil cases; don't know whether that's changed in the last 10 years.

At any rate, J. Daniels appears to have a particular problem, since he's been mandamused a few times and has a much bigger backlog than any other judge in SDNY, as well as the rest of the country.

In his defense, I will note a proud tradition of dumping terrible cases on new judges. Before a new judge gets a normal case load from the random assignment of new cases, the other judges in his district will transfer some of their cases to him (I assume this is true in SDNY; it is other places). The louder a case barks, the more difficult it is, or the worse the lawyers involved, the more likely it is to get passed along to the new judge. Call it a hazing ritual. Since J. Daniels was appointed in 2000, it is possible it took him 2-3 years to get dug out from a mountain of crap handed to him by his judicial bretheren. I don't know, but it's possible.

Btw, a big backlog on the six-month motion report is an indicator of a problem, but a clean six-month report does not necessarily mean all is well. There are a lot of things that don't show up on that report (decisions on bench trials, filings of pre-trial orders . . .), and there may be temptation to do the judicial equivalent of teaching to the test -- clean up the pending motions and let other things slide that aren't listed on the report. Not a lot of temptation though. Most judges don't take the six-month motion report seriously enough to do that kind of manipulation.

Please quote a small snippet of articles in NYT and other news sites requiring soul-scarring blood donations prior to reading. I have no intention of "registering" at every site on earth so that I may be subjected to even more spam.

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