341.1 Judge Harry Pregerson Memorial Frontage Road
Good ol' Anonymous posted a comment to the main road of this post explaining the origin of the Judge Pregerson Memorial MixMaster, even supplying a link to a New York Times article explaining the judge's deep involvement in the development of the project. As a district judge, Pregerson oversaw litigation that fattened the Westlaw database by 13 opinions over the course of 25 years, even continuing to sit as trial judge by designation after his elevation to the Ninth Circuit.
I'm pretty sympathetic to the goal of ameliorating the community disruption caused by freeway construction. Community-buster Robert Moses, I'm convinced, bore more responsibility than any other individual for New York's decline into the ungovernable city.
Still, I can't help but suspect that it's within the realm of possibility that the California Department of Transportation, which signed the consent decree overseen by Pregerson, didn't put up much of a fight when its legal opponents demanded it receive $2.2 billion to spend.
Consent decrees, by which executive branch agencies pretend to lose lawsuits in order to bind their legislatures without all the muss and fuss of the democratic process, give judges the glory of increasing spending in the public eye while leaving to legislators the unpleasant task of trimming other budget items during contentious late-night committee meetings.
Consent decrees are another type of community-busting: replacing Jacobean mob rule with the more decisive rule of a king and his lawyer-courtiers. Still, dubious methods frequently produce beneficial effects. It's just money, after all.
So the green sign dedicating the freeway interchange to Judge Pregerson can be viewed as a reward for his his hard judicial labor ordering other people to perform hard real labor. Viewed in that way, it's an odd honor - even if, as I suggested, a cheap and rather ambiguous one. Naming rights are apparently considered valuable things, in some contexts. Isn't there something a bit ... odd about a federal judge accepting something of value as additional compensation for doing his job?
But, I think, that's not the right way to look at it. I think the interchange was named for him in very much the same spirit in which the airport freeway itself is officially named the Dan Ryan Freeway, or Glenn Anderson Expressway, or whatever.
It's the true Chicago spirit. On my first visit to Chicago, every downtown street corner had paint on the pavement reminding me to visit "Mayor Jane Byrne's ChicagoFest." You could register your car or renew your driver's license at "Secretary of State JIM EDGAR's" storefront operations.
Pregerson's name on the interchange isn't a monument to his judicial service. It's an acknowledgment that he was the political boss in charge of the project.
Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 12:17PM in De-democratization, Individual judges
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