Sitting by Reverse Designation

Law.com has Court-Hopping: Should More Appellate Judges Visit District Courts? -- Federal appellate judges Timothy Tymkovich and Jennifer Elrod talk about the reasons they volunteer to visit district courts.

• From September 2021 to September 2022, there were 32 federal appeals court judges who provided services to district courts, according to statistics from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (compared to 160 district judges who visited appeals courts in the same time period). A decade earlier, there were 22 appellate judges who provided services to district courts in a 12-month span. And from 2011 to 2012, that number was 11.
• Tymkovich is one of five judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit who presided over district court cases. While it’s far more typical for trial judges to visit appellate courts, Tymkovich said he and his colleagues are motivated by both a desire to help tackle lower court caseloads and to gain a different perspective.
• Former Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit has previously urged his appellate colleagues to volunteer to sit on trial courts. And in his 2016 book “Divergent Paths,” Posner wrote: “How can an appellate judge review a trial when he has never seen one, except perhaps in a movie?”
• Most recently, an article in Duke University’s Bolch Judicial Institute’s scholarly journal by professor Marin Levy noted the benefits both courts can gain from the practice, which she called “sitting by reverse designation.”

California Supreme Court to Hold April 4 Oral Argument Remotely -- Due to technical issues arising out of a recent weather-related power outage, oral argument on Tuesday will be held remotely.