During this holiday season, Marylanders can perhaps rejoice in the fact their top court is a “point of light” and not a “judicial hellhole,” according to a national organization that seeks to rein in what it considers runaway jury awards.

In its annual report, the American Tort Reform Association praises the Maryland Court of Appeals for its Sept. 24 decision upholding the state’s statutory cap on noneconomic damages. By contrast, ATRA scorns the Illinois and Georgia supreme courts for striking down their state laws limiting awards for pain and suffering.

In contrast to the “reasonableness” of Maryland’s high court, justices in those two “judicial hellholes” replaced “the policy judgments of elected legislators and governors with their own,” ATRA’s report says.

The Maryland Court of Appeals, in DRD Pool Service Inc. v. Freed, said the state legislature had a”rational basis” for enacting the cap on noneconomic damages. The General Assembly limited awards for pain and suffering to achieve the “legitimate legislative objective” of keeping insurance costs down for companies and individuals, as the cap enables insurers to better predict their financial exposure in litigation, the court said.

“In our view, the cap continues to serve a legitimate government purpose,” Judge Clayton Greene Jr. wrote for the court’s 6-judge majority.

Judge Joseph F. Murphy Jr., the sole dissenter, argued for a stricter standard. He said the cap’s defenders should have to show that it is substantially related to an important legislative objective.

Maryland’s noneconomic damages cap, which increases by $15,000 every Oct. 1, is currently $740,000.

Do you regard the court’s decision as a point of light?

It was all over the news in October –  Mississippi Chancery Judge Talmadge Littlejohn jailed an attorney who refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in his courtroom.

I was nothing short of baffled to hear that an officer of the court in his 70s — who spent his long career as a state lawmaker, prosecutor and judge — could get the Constitution so completely and appallingly wrong. Even someone with the most basic understanding of the First Amendment should realize that compulsory unification of opinion is unconstitutional.

To make matters worse, Littlejohn stubbornly stuck to his guns, requiring all in his courtroom to again recite the pledge just one day after the national uproar over his treatment of lawyer Danny Lampley.

The Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance last week recommended to the state Supreme Court that Littlejohn be publicly reprimanded and pay $100 in court costs for jailing Lampley, according to the Clarion Ledger.

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Everyone agrees the Baltimore City Circuit Court buildings are “absolutely terrible” and that a new courthouse is in order, the city’s administrative judge declared at a meeting of city and state criminal justice officials last fall.

To this end, the city and its circuit court ponied up between $600,000 and $700,000 for a Maryland Stadium Authority-picked consultant to study the upgrade possibilities.

At that same September 2009 Baltimore City Criminal Justice Coordinating Council meeting, the representative from Los Angeles-based consultancy AECOM Inc. promised a final report with recommendations by this past spring.

In January, MSA spokeswoman Jan Hardesty offered assurances of that schedule.

“It’s on course, it’s on schedule,” Hardesty said. “It should be out in early spring.”

When nothing came out by June, I spoke with Judge Marcella Holland, the city’s administrative judge, who told me the study’s publication date was more likely to be late summer. When it still wasn’t out by late September, I asked again after its progress. The latest update came Friday from MSA Project Executive Gary A. McGuigan, who acknowledged the delay but said such an important matter should not be rushed.

“It’s still going to be a little bit,” he said. “My best guess right now is it’s probably going to be the end of the year.

“It’s very complicated. It’s a very large report, and we want to make sure we get this thing right,” McGuigan explained. “It’s taken longer than I had hoped, but like I said, we want to get this thing right.”

So, given that it’s already been several years that litigants, lawyers, judges, courthouse employees and members of the public have had to deal with a decaying — if still stately in some ways — pair of courthouses, and it won’t be several more years (or, God forbid, decades) until the problem is properly solved, what’s another year or so (and a half million dollars) more spent putting a plan together?

Baltimore County businessman Jack W. Stollof was sentenced to a year and a day of home detention in May for his role in a years-long, multimillion-dollar tax sale bid-rigging scheme.

Perhaps the only reason Stollof, who reportedly drove around in his Jaguar to check up on the properties he’d bought, didn’t receive a prison term like co-defendant and fellow septuagenarian Harvey M. Nusbaum, a lawyer, is because he has a heart condition, as well as a history of bladder cancer and meningitis, and the presiding federal judge decided he was too fragile to survive a year in the clink.

Apparently encouraged by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz’s clemency, Stollof, through his attorneys, has made several attempts to modify the terms of his home confinement. Hey, why not?

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When I heard last night that Baltimore City Circuit Chief Judge John N. Prevas had died from a heart attack apparently suffered while at the downtown courthouse, I thought, among other things, of a passage in a recent City Paper cover story written by one of Prevas’ former law clerks.

Hal Riedl’s story was about a repeat violent offender Prevas had sentenced in 1987, who recently went away again for a sex offense. In bringing the reader into the present day after recounting the history, Riedl wrote these unfortunately prescient lines about his former boss:

“His health has been poor for years, and I’m trying to persuade him to retire. I know very well that won’t happen — one day he’ll simply keel over in court.”

I’m working on Prevas’ obituary today and I hope to speak to Riedl, who I first met while we watched the Sheila Dixon trial together and most recently saw at Gregg Bernstein’s post-election press conference. Others with memories of Judge Prevas are welcome to call me at 443-524-8156 or leave them in the comments section of this blog.

Lawyers for Jacksonville residents and ExxonMobil Corp. are back in Baltimore County Circuit Court on Thursday and Friday for pretrial hearings on the experts the plaintiffs are seeking to use in the upcoming gas station leak trial.

(The most recent start date for the trial was Monday, but that has been postponed until the end of November.)

Thursday’s hearing began with some discovery motions filed by The Law Offices of Peter G. Angelos PC, which represents approximately 450 individuals and 150 households in Jacksonville. Lawyers for the plaintiffs wanted documents about the remediation effort from Kleinfelder, which worked on the spill site.

A lawyer for Kleinfelder said the documents would be available by next week. When pressed by the plaintiffs as to the amount of information, Judge Robert N. Dugan jumped in.

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If it’s the first Monday in October, it must be the first day of the Supreme Court term. Check out retired Justice John Paul Stevens’ chat with NPR’s Nina Totenberg on the one vote he regrets. And, without further adieu, on to the law links:

• Are recreational activity torts making a comeback?
• Can a green coating under your tongue prove that you’ve been using marijuana? Jon Katz at the Underdog blog calls it junk science.
• Page Croyder reflects on last month’s Baltimore state’s attorney election.
• The Maryland Law Review wants to let its work evolve through conversation — adding taped interviews with profs and taped discussions between themselves about the articles.
• In Europe, fathers should be entitled to breastfeeding leave too.
• The San Jose Mercury News takes a look at Gloria Allred’s use of the media (ht Legal Ethics Forum).
• This one’s hard to believe.

Well, it looks like fall has arrived. Here are some law links to ease you into this rainy Monday.

• If Washington’s law firm revenues are any indication of how regional firms are doing, it’s a mixed bag.
• President Obama still can’t get his judicial nominees confirmed.
• We told you a couple weeks ago about a South Carolina lawyer who was admonished by the state’s Supreme Court for having sex with a client’s wife. The Maryland Lawyer Blog points out that in South Carolina, the admonishment came without mention of the lawyer’s name, but, try that in Maryland, and the Court of Appeals will be pointing fingers, and naming names.
• No more excuses for poor voir dire prep. Just use your laptop.
• Was Stephen Colbert’s appearance before a House committee in character pointed or pointless? Readers of Concurring Opinions disagree with the blog.
• The Supreme Court will start its session next week with tests on free speech.
• British copyright infringement firm’s files hacked.

The state Board of Elections’ vote totals are still listed as “unofficial.” But a week out from election day, I think I can report the results of the contested judicial elections primaries without fear of a “Dewey Defeats Truman” situation.

There were three contested judicial races in the state, with sitting judges in other jurisdictions running unopposed. In Cecil County, Judge V. Michael Whelan defeated challengers Harry D. Barnes and John H. Buck, while all four sitting judges in Baltimore County – Jan Alexander, Sherrie Bailey, Ann Brobst and John Nagle III – cruised to victory over challenger T. Scott Beckman.

The race was much closer in Anne Arundel County, however. Challenger Alison Asti finished second in the Republican primary and missed out on second in the Democratic primary by just 500 votes (out of 56,000 cast) in her bid to unseat either Judge Laura Kiessling or Judge Ron Jarashow.

A state election board official said the top two finishers in each primary move forward to November’s general election. That means all three candidates’ names will appear on the ballot in alphabetical order. (Kiessling, who won both primaries, will only be on the ballot once.) The two top vote-getters will receive a 15-year term on the circuit court bench.

Looks like my guide on how to become a clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court is now at least a two-part series. In Part One, I told you the importance of coming from a top-10 law school. Today’s lesson: have the right (or left) ideology.

The New York Times reported this week that all 84 of Justice Clarence Thomas‘ clerks “have first clerked for an appeals court judge appointed by a Republican president.”

Thomas explained his reasoning a decade ago, according to The Times: “I won’t hire clerks who have profound disagreements with me. It’s like trying to train a pig. It wastes your time, and it aggravates the pig.”

Thomas is the extreme example of a growing partisan trend in clerk picking on the Roberts court, with the conservative justices almost exclusively following Thomas’ example while liberal justices largely pick clerks who served for appeals court judges appointed by Democratic president. Justice Stephen Breyer is the only member of the court who comes close to picking an equal number of clerks from both sides.

The Times also reports this doozy: More than half of the clerks who have served on the Roberts court came from the chambers of just 10 judges. Three judges accounted for a fifth of all Supreme Court clerks. So if you clerk for Judge Merrick B. Garland in D.C. or Judge Alex Kozinski on the 9th Circuit, you’re in luck!

A 2008 study found that clerks that identified themselves as Democrats increased the chances of a liberal vote by their judge in the same manner as a Republican clerk/conservative justice combination.

New Justice Elana Kagan‘s clerks for her first term, incidentally, show another popular trend – clerks who clerked for other justices. Kagan took former clerks of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy.