Judicial smackdown time

Judges are sup­posed to be staid, calm and emo­tion­less beings who lis­ten atten­tively to the evi­dence and then issue a well-reasoned and bal­anced opin­ion. Most of the time, that’s what they strive to do. But judges are peo­ple and they are sub­ject to the same emo­tions and frus­tra­tions that we all are. Some­times those frus­tra­tions boil over into their writ­ten deci­sions and they can­not help but issue a judi­cial “smackdown.”