If they could go outside and work it out, why would they have spent all that money on lawyers, paying them to draw and file documents, taking time out of life and work, and withdrawing anything that was left in the goodwill bank?Īs it turns out, they are very good questions, because in many cases, people do go out of the court room and they do work it out with the help of their lawyers. Now for most people, that is absolutely not why they came to court. If the case is urgent (a bomb) it will get priority, if not, there is a high probability that the spouses will be asked by the judge to go outside the court room with their lawyers and work it out. The reality is that every case is either flying fruit or a bomb. Nobody wants to go to court to be treated like a piece of flying fruit, right? They certainly don’t want to think of themselves as one more flying object the judge has to slice, dice or duck. At the very least, when a person does not win, they want to feel that the process was fair and considered.

They simply want the judge to give the time and attention to really listen to their case, to distinguish their circumstances from all the other cases that judge has ever heard or will hear, and to decide in their favour. Quite naturally, there is no space in the mind of a litigant to think about the experience of the judge. The fact that the judge is playing Ninja would come as a shock to most people who are in court to have their case decided. Going to court is extremely stressful it is also costly and often downright terrifying. Judges suffer stress and trauma as a result of their work, and that is not healthy for them, the system or the court users. (For the record, I wasn’t bad at Fruit Ninja for five minutes, and I think that’s about as long as I’d last as a duty list judge).įor judges, the need to make fast and accurate decisions and then live with the reality that their best often isn’t seen that way by litigants, is definitely not fun and games. As a Fruit Ninja, you need to quickly identify the fruit that’s coming at you, avoid the bombs and bananas, and at the same time decide where to accurately slice the fast-flying fruit, hopefully, more than one piece at a time, without making a moosh of it. Sounds stressful, doesn’t it? This is how I imagine a family court judge feels when faced with a list of tens of cases that need to be sorted for urgency, deferred or “sent upstairs”.Ī recent visit to Chuckee Cheese (Canada) and a video game of Fruit Ninja brought to mind a comparison between judges and fruit ninjas. And now imagine doing that every day for years, with the burden of being expected to deliver a perfect score and not make “fruit salad” out of the problems you are faced with. Imagine yourself climbing out of bed every day and heading to work in a job where you don’t know quite what’s going to come at you, from what direction, at what speed, and where the “bombs” are lurking.

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