Court Opinion

ID: 9483084
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:10:24.799712+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:24.621594
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
The intricate interpretive maneuvers that lawyers use to answer questions of statutory meaning lead nowhere in this case, because in this case for every dialectic or casuistic thrust there is an equally persuasive parry. On the one hand the statute says that “bankruptcy judges [not juries] may hear and determine ... all core proceedings,” but on the other hand this can be read as “bankruptcy judges may hear and determine ... all core proceedings [whether they are jury or nonjury cases].” It is all a matter of emphasis. If, on the one hand, as just noted, the statute does not expressly authorize jury trials, as the magistrates’ act for example does, on the other hand the Seventh Amendment was held to entitle the defendants in Curtis v. Loether, 415 U.S. 189, 94 S.Ct. 1005, 39 L.Ed.2d 260 (1974), to a jury trial even though the statute under which they had been sued was silent on the question. On the one hand the Bankruptcy Rules make no provision for jury trial, but on the other hand the provision for jury trial that the rules once contained was deleted in order to leave the question up to the courts. And so it goes. One marvels at the learning and ingenuity of the adversaries but is brought no nearer to a sense of what the statute means. The majority opinion, with refreshing candor, reports the parries as well as the thrusts, but insists that the statute has a meaning and that the court has found it.
I think on the contrary that we have here an unbridgeable, unpluggable statutory gap. A question — whether bankruptcy judges can conduct jury trials in matters in which the Seventh Amendment entitles the parties to trial by jury — has arisen the answer to which cannot be found in the statute. The question is not addressed in the Bankruptcy Code because at the time the Code was adopted the question was not a live one. There had been no right to a jury trial under the old bankruptcy law. Douglas G. Baird, “Jury Trials After Granfinanciera,” 65 Am.Bankr.L.J. 1, 2-4 (1991). Apparently everyone had been content with that regime. But then Congress, without considering the possible implications for the right to a jury trial in bankruptcy, enlarged bankruptcy jurisdiction to the point where it embraced proceedings, such as a trustee’s action for fraudulent conveyance against a transferee of the debtor, that the Supreme Court later held to be actions at law within the meaning of the Seventh Amendment, even though the proceeding was filed in bankruptcy court, as part of a bankruptcy case. Granfinanci-era, S.A. v. Nordberg, 492 U.S. 33, 109 S.Ct. 2782, 106 L.Ed.2d 26 (1989). The Court did not decide who should conduct the trial — the bankruptcy judge or the district judge. And Congress had never even dreamed there was such a question. We must decide. We are entirely on our own and can find no assistance in statutory text, legislative history, precedent, or other sources of guidance to statutory meaning.
We ought in these circumstances to base our decision on practical considerations, and they all line up on the side of allowing bankruptcy judges to conduct jury trials. The main advantage is that it avoids shifting a case, or rather part of a ease, from one tribunal and one judge — the bankruptcy court and bankruptcy judge — to another — the district court and the district judge. Such a shift, which not only interrupts an ongoing proceeding and shoves it into a different court but also breaks a single bankruptcy among courts, is wasteful of the time and resources of litigants and judges and injects extraneous considerations into a party’s decision on whether to demand a jury trial. In the federal system at least, a demand for a jury trial is not a demand for a different judge, let alone for a different kind of judge. But under the view taken by the court in this case, a party to a bankruptcy proceeding who for whatever reason would like to have a different judge has an incentive to demand trial by jury that is unrelated to the ordinary considerations that motivate such a demand. Juries will be dragged into cases because litigants dislike particular judges.
*1160The advantage that I have just described of allowing bankruptcy judges to conduct jury trials would count for little if such judges were incompetent to conduct them. They are competent, even though they do not have life tenure, as federal district judges do. Very few state trial judges have life tenure either, yet the vast majority of jury cases in this country are tried in state courts and we do not hear howls of protest. Many federal judicial officers— not just bankruptcy judges — lack life tenure yet conduct jury trials. Judges of the District of Columbia superior court are one example. Judges of the territorial courts are another. What used to be called U.S. commissioners, then federal magistrates, now federal magistrate judges have similar although not identical conditions of tenure and compensation as bankruptcy judges, compare 28 U.S.C. §§ 152(a)(1), (e), 153(a), with 28 U.S.C. §§ 631(e), (i), 634(a), yet they are expressly empowered to conduct jury trials, provided that the parties consent. I once questioned the constitutional power of magistrates to conduct jury trials, Geras v. Lafayette Display Fixtures, Inc., 742 F.2d 1037, 1045, 1048-49 (7th Cir.1984) (dissenting opinion), but that was because I doubted the power of Article I judges to try Article III cases, and that is not an issue here. The major difference between magistrate judges and bankruptcy judges, that the latter have a longer tenure — 14 years versus 8 — makes the case for allowing bankruptcy judges to conduct jury trials stronger than the case for allowing magistrate judges to do so.
Of course a requirement that the parties consent, which we find in the magistrates’ act, makes a difference. But I do not suppose that Congress would allow federal cases to be tried before panels of astrologers, necromancers, clairvoyants, or judges of cat shows or (other) beauty contests provided only that the litigants consented. Congress must have thought that magistrate judges were competent to conduct jury trials and if they are, so must bankruptcy judges be. It would be a mistake to infer from the fact that Congress required consent for trials before magistrates that it would have required consent for jury trials before bankruptcy judges had the issue arisen. The magistrates’ statute does not require consent to a jury trial before a magistrate judge, but to any trial before a magistrate judge. Their entire trial jurisdiction is consensual. 28 U.S.C. § 631(c); Geras v. Lafayette Display Fixtures, Inc., supra, 742 F.2d at 1041-42. The bankruptcy trial jurisdiction is not.
Since the same rules of evidence apply in bench and in jury trials, the biggest differences between the two sorts of trial from the judge’s standpoint are jury voir dire and jury instructions. Any competent judicial officer can voir dire or instruct a jury. Although we held in Olympia Hotels Corp. v. Johnson Wax Development Corp., 908 F.2d 1363, 1368-69 (7th Cir.1990), that a magistrate judge cannot conduct a voir dire without the parties’ consent even in a civil case, that consent is easily obtained. Many district judges now use magistrate judges routinely to voir dire the jury not only in civil cases but also in criminal cases (an authorized procedure, provided, once again, that the defendant consents, Peretz v. United States, — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 2661, 115 L.Ed.2d 808 (1991)), and use law clerks to draft jury instructions — when they don’t just take instructions tendered by the litigants or copied out of pattern jury instruction books. I do think it is somewhat more challenging to conduct a jury trial than a bench trial but I do not think the additional challenge is beyond the capacity of bankruptcy judges — experienced, specialized judicial officers who since 1982 have been selected on a meritocratic, nonpolitical basis. Political considerations play a greater role in the appointment of Article III judges, so we should not be astonished that a recent report found “that the Bankruptcy Court now has the best bench, top to bottom, of any court in the City of Chicago.” “Council of Lawyers’ Report on Bankruptcy Court,” Chicago L. Bull., Jan. 13,1992, at 2. That is just one city but I would not be surprised if the result were general. It is true that bankruptcy judges are not likely to conduct a great many jury trials, but law is not like surgery: you don’t have to conduct a jury trial every day to maintain your skills.
The emphasis placed on the fact that bankruptcy judges do not have life tenure *1161is misguided, because whatever the significance of life tenure — however strong the case for giving judicial officers such tenure — it has nothing to do with any difference between bench trials and jury trials. If only a judicial officer with life tenure can be trusted to render exact and impartial justice under law, this is as true in bench trials as in jury trials. In fact it is more true in bench trials, because in bench trials the judge bears the sole decisional responsibility, while in jury trials he divides it with private citizens. The right to a jury, insofar as it is a limitation on judges’ power, is more needful the less trustworthy the judge is.
We should be realistic. The question whether to allow bankruptcy judges to conduct jury trials has not been answered for us by Congress. It has been left to us. We should decide it in the way most consistent with sensible judicial administration, and without concern that Article I judicial officers may appear to be encroaching on the turf — usurping the prerogatives — of Article III judges. We should answer the question “yes.”