Last year, a brand new Federal courthouse opened in Boston-$185,000,000 worth! This monstrosity has:
-private apartments (with kitchens and showers for the judges)
-a private boat dock (it fronts the harbor), with slips for the judges(and wealthy lawyers who own boats) to dock at
-custom made, etched glass windows (over $25,000 a pop)
-pithy sayings by famous judges and lawyers of the past, engraved on the sandstone walls (big bucks as well).
The bill paying for this was rammed through the house by the late Rep. Joe Moakley, a long-term South Boston hack. It (the courthouse) also has the unique distinction of being named for Mr. Moakley, whilehe was still alive.
I was intrigued by this huge waste of out tax money, and found out that new federal couthouses have also been built in Atlanta, San Antonio, and a host of other cities-these also have been $150 million-plus affairs!
And, in Boston, we have a perfectly GOOD Fedral courthouse (in Post Office Square, built in 1935)!
I also learned that Federal courthouses are EMPTY 85% of the time! So if you look at the cost and the extremely LOW utilization, these are some of the MOST expensive buildings to operate, that have EVER been constructed!
Now, I have a question: in Massachusetts, the stae/county courthouses are literally falling down-the buildings are old and poorly maintained, and crowded. So, why cant’t they use these Federal courthouses?
And, why are politicians so keen to construct Fedral courthouses? Is the graft from building them especially lucrative?
Your tax dollars at waste-can anybody explain why we lavish so much money on these mostley empty buildings?
Don’t you read your conspiracy newsletters? The courtrooms are being built as processing centers for disenfranchised gun-owning whites who will be rounded up once the New World Order seizes control of the federal government.
Geez, do I have to explain EVERYTHING?!
Most likely, it’s a pork-barrel project your congressman WANTED in his district because some local construction company (who contributes to his campaign) saw a juicy federal contract.
That’s simply untrue. I have had cases in several district courts in the federal system and I can tell you that federal dockets have exploded in the last 20 years for a variety of reasons. Starting with Reagan’s “war on drugs”, a great number of former state drug offenses were federalized (or more properly, existing laws were enforced with more vigor by the justice department) and have had a huge effect on dockets. Civil rights litigation usually ends up in federal court, and those laws have only been in place for 30 years. Intellectual property litigation (copyright, patent, trademark) has literally exploded over the last 10 years, mostly due to the internet and information based economy the U.S. has developed. Bankruptcy filings are at an all time high. Combined with Congress’ late tendency to federalize most everything, Federal dockets are uncommonly crowded. Federal Judges work much harder today than they did 20 years ago. They will work much harder still if Mr. Bush is successful in his misguided effort to federalize medical malpractice.
As a result, starting in the early 1990’s a number of federal district court seats were added. Many courthouses simply don’t have enough physical room for the new courtrooms. In my local federal building, the problem was solved by moving the IRS offices to a different building and renovating their floor to add two courtrooms. That may or may not be possible in other locations.
As for the opulance of your new courthouse, I haven’t been there so I can’t comment. But I suspect Mr. Ekers’ pork-barrel observation is fairly close to the mark.
For what it’s worth, I’ve also noticed that the gummint seems to be being very lavish in construction and refurbishment of Federal courthouses. No idea what’s driving it.
I also accept that federal litigation has been increasing with time and will continue to increase.
In the last 30-40 years, many statutes have been passed creating new Federal causes of action - for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act; the Family Medical Leave Act; RICO; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; etc.
Do you have any cites that show that these laws have lead to a significant increase in the caseload? Houlihan’s examples sounds more probable to me. According to this document, civil rights cases accounted for about 1% of the district courts dockets in 2001. This says that 35% of pending criminal cases were drug offenses. A large majority of cases in federal courts are diversity cases (state law cases where the parties are from different states), though I don’t know if there has been a significant increase in diversity cases.
Nope, it’s a guess on my part, based on my (biased) experiences.
By the way chula, as I read the document you cite, there are approximately 44,000 civil rights cases pending out of approximately 450,000 civil cases.
This seems like a lot more than 1% to me, but perhaps I am misreading the chart.
Of course, I don’t know if the chart you cite reflects the entire caseload.
I don’t see where you’re getting those numbers. I see 252,935 total civil cases and 3,384 civil rights cases.
What do you mean by the “entire caseload”?
Well, the politics are pretty simple, really: combine some genuine needs with ordinary porkbarrel instincts and an understandable belief that courthouses should be imposing, and you end up with a buncha hugely expensive boondoggles. I know of a number of quite…elaborate federal courthouses of recent vintage, in addition to the ones the OP mentions: the Southern District/Second Circuit courthouse in Lower Manhattan, the Eastern District in Brooklyn (still under construction), the Quentin Burdick federal courthouse in Fargo…the list goes on and on. The New York Eastern District recently opened another new courthouse on Long Island, by top architect Richard Meier (famed for the High Museum/Atlanta and the Getty complex in LA); according to a juror who wrote in to the NY times, it’s very pretty but its many-story atrium is very cold and hard to heat. Granted, the building it replaced in Uniondale was a dump, not very secure and woefully inadequate for Long Island’s burgeoning population and federal caseload, but the scale of this thing is a bit obscene. It’s literally visible for miles.
I’m curious about the 85% statistic. That strikes me as quite high and open to great interpretation - I mean, my apartment is very small, but by a perfectly valid definition it’s well over 85% empty right now: I’m sitting in one corner typing this.
Well, those figures seem to apply to “U.S. cases”
If you take a look at the second page - “private cases” - it appears that there are an additional 41,000 civil rights cases.