#at least he didn't say “longino”?

[rosetta-j-stone]

Adorable <3

someone get this man his three kaksi ananas lonkero STAT ‼️‼️‼️‼️

[dankusner]

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CHAPTER 20

of the court system is a P or municipal court. You sy to treat them with dignity and respect. You're dealing with a lot of pro se litigants. You Can. give them legal advice, but you try to be as helpful as legally possible. And

you let the chips fall where they may.

I'm your best friend or your worst enemy. Choose wisely!

Hon. Nancy J. Pomykal (Calhoun County): I told someone one day who asked, "What's it like to be a IP?" I said, "I's easy. First of all, you have to be a Philadelphia lawyer. You have to have the patience of lob, and you have to have the wisdom of Solomon. Also, compassion. Its extremely important to have good people skills because of all the upset people you have to deal with."

Hon. Billy Hefner (Colorado County): My job is to make people better citizens, and that's the way I look at it. I work with kids. I work with

My takeaways from all my talks with judges are three-fold.

The first: how often I found IPs agreeing with one another. I'd ask what was the best part of the job, and only rarely would I not hear: "the chance to help people." Over and over again, their care for their communities and their desire to be a source of assistance came through, not only via their statements of commitment, but also through the active example of their outreach to their constituents. I don't think these judges woke up one morning and decided to pursue a life of civic succor. I believe it's something ingrained in them, a part of who they are, perhaps even dating back to childhood. Darrell Longino (Polk County) recalled sitting on the porch with his grandfather, who owned the local general

store.

He became kind of an elder to the working-class people. We had a bunch of cotton farmers and truck farmers down in the river bottom, and a lot of them couldn't read and write. So they'd go to my grandfather to help them decipher letters and things like that. Those folks would come up and say, "Mr. Craig, how are you?"

"Mighty fine. What's your trouble?"

I've thought so many times how proud he would be to know that I'd grown up to become a justice of the peace by following in his footsteps.

And in Conclusion

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Everybody has problems, everybody has things that go wrong in their ( to stay Spurlock, Jack Com the live out I want rong in en.

- Hon. Stacy Spurlock, Jack County

Another area of agreement involves death investigations. Seldom did I speak to a JP who was comfortable doing inquest, though some would say they'd reached thesin of at least being able to sequester that lulad association with the stark and repeated reality of death in their close yards, emotionally partitioning it in such a way that it didn't end up short-circuiting the other areas of their lives.

Others continue to struggle with how to process and compartmental-ize the kinds of visceral reactions to situations that tug and assault and not just those that arise from dealing with the dead and the grieving.

There are many other heart challenges that go along with the job of being Texas IP: having to evict people from their homes; working with at-risk, troubled kids, who often seem beyond help; having to formulate action plans to assist people beaten down by financial struggles; mediating conflict between families torn apart by baked-in animus and calcified resentments; and having to extend judicial lifelines to those who are at the end of their tethers without easy recourse to making themselves whole again. Yet as difficult as all this sounds, these are the very things that give them the most gratification in their jobs: being there for people and extending a helping hand, not only to the most helpless and vulnerable of their constituents, but also to those who just need to be shown how to help themselves.

My second takeaway contrasts sharply with the first, as exemplified in chapter sixteen, "In the Opinion of the Court." There are a lot of different ways of doing all the things that JPs are required to do. Likewise, there are divergent perspectives on their job. There are judges who perform weddings and those who do not, judges who act as county coroners and those who don't, judges who hear one or two eviction cases a year and those who hear hundreds a month. There are JPs with neighborly, open-door policies and those who do everything by the book to obviate even the whiff of favoritism.

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