Court and Cthulhu!

[elfs]

Well, the big question is: how did court go?

I learned that comissioners have very little power of discretion. They are the janitors of the legal system, cleaning up what the judges don't want to deal with. They have a comission from a superior judge and marching orders and that's about it. They do "raw numbers" work and the petty spats over monthly enforcements and crap like that. The comissioner in our case looked over the details and had more or less made up her mind when we walked in; she didn't want to deal in petty grievances or micromanagement, she just wanted to get the child support done according to the letter of the law.

And that's what she did. Ex predictably tried to argue, to wheedle, to contradict; I figured out quickly enough that this was a no-nonsense comissioner, but Ex managed to get the comissioner's ire up a bit. She does this every year. Still, I get the feeling the commissioner's been doing this enough that it would take a lot for her to get personally worked up about such a small difference. So the Ex gets told that she does have a financial responsibility to Yamaarashi-chan whether she wants it or not, gets told what that amount is, and that was that. Ten minutes and it was over. Omaha was actually disappointed that out of the four inches of documents submitted to the court over the past two years, it all came down to four pages the commissioner herself filled out in a spreadsheet. That and absolutely unambiguous law and doctrine.

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Cthulhu lives! Yes, ladies and gentlement, Cthulhu has washed up on shore in Chile. When night comes, be prepared for screams.

Comments

[voltbang.livejournal.com]

I figured out quickly enough that this was a no-nonsense comissioner

I sued a landlord once, and got a judge like that. The landlord tried to make excuses and stuff long after the judge had found the legal problem, and almost got herself some nice yummy contempt of court to go along with loosing the case. If you get a no-nonsense judge (or comissioner or whatever), don't argue except on actual legal grounds, and take your lumps if you have lumps coming.

[lisakit.livejournal.com]

Actually, most judges and their subordinates (commissioners, clerks, etc.) are pretty no-nonsense. It can raise too many questions and open things up for what would otherwise be unnecessary appeals if they didn't closely follow the given laws. Any mistake by a court can be ground for an appeal.