Empty wood-paneled American courtroom interior with late afternoon light
Image, archive placeholder. A drawing of an empty bench, where Burt Hanson sat through most of his working life.
From the Archive

BurtLaw's Court Gazing

For nearly four years, a retired lawyer from St. Paul kept a careful, dryly funny ledger of what actually happens in American courtrooms. He wrote about the rituals, the recesses, the small mercies, the boredom, the theater. Here is the essay that started it.

"Court is not, in the main, an arena of clashing intellects," Hanson wrote in the opening pages. "It is an arena of waiting. The intellect is what you do with the waiting."

By Burt Hanson · · 11 min read
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Most Recent

  • A Closing Note from the Bench

    Hanson's last essay, written in the autumn of 2007, on what he learned by watching judges learn.

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    Wooden judge's gavel on polished mahogany

  • Romantic Films Lawyers Love

    A short, affectionate list, including "The Philadelphia Story" and at least one defense of "Adam's Rib."

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  • Dogs I Have Known in Courthouses

    Four bailiff dogs, one therapy dog, and a stray that wandered into a 1972 jury trial and stayed for closing arguments.

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Editors' Picks

  • BurtLaw's Lawyers on Parade

    A field guide to the working bar of greater Minneapolis, circa 2004. Affectionate, accurate, and occasionally lethal.

    Burt Hanson ·

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  • BurtLaw's Legal History

    Six unfashionable Minnesota cases from before 1950 that explain more than any Supreme Court opinion of the past decade.

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  • A Brief History of the Black Robe

    From mourning the death of Queen Mary II in 1694 to the Hennepin County bench in 2005. A garment, and an argument.

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  • Poetry and the Common Law

    Justice Cardozo wrote in cadences. Justice Holmes wrote in epigrams. Hanson asks why the rest of us write in sludge.

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Recently Added to the Archive

Judge's private chambers with legal books and brass desk lamp
Court Gazing

Notes from a Long Afternoon in Civil Court

Eighteen motions before noon, four of them about subpoenas duces tecum, two of them about whether the parties had met and conferred. Hanson kept count.

By Burt Hanson · · 14 min read

Marble courthouse staircase with classical columns
Lawyers on Parade

What Judges Read When No One Is Watching

A small, unscientific survey of the chambers shelves of seventeen Minnesota district judges. The results include Cheever, Carver, and a remarkable amount of Patrick O'Brian.

By Burt Hanson · · 9 min read

Index

The Full Archive

Fifty-nine essays, presented here in full. Arranged alphabetically by title.

A to B

C to N

P to T

W to Y

About the Author

About

Minnesota State Capitol building, where Burton Hanson served as Deputy Commissioner for over 26 years
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Burton Randall Hanson, who blogged as "Burt," was one of the earliest law bloggers in the United States. Born in Benson, Minnesota on May 30, 1943, he earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in sociology, political science, and history (he also attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia and Minnesota.

Hanson spent the bulk of his legal career inside the Minnesota Supreme Court system. He served one year as a Special Term Civil Law Clerk at Hennepin County District Court, two years as personal law clerk to Associate Justice C. Donald Peterson, and more than twenty-six years as a Deputy Commissioner of the Minnesota Supreme Court, specializing in criminal case review.

Hanson left the Court and ran as a nonpartisan candidate for Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court in November 2000. In 2004 he ran in the Republican primary for Congress in Minnesota's Third District as an anti-war candidate. He used a weblog to support both campaigns, which is believed to be among the earliest uses of political blogging in American electoral history.

He launched LawAndEverythingElse.com, the blog archived on this site, in the early 2000s. He later founded TheDailyJudge.com and BurtonHanson.com, which collected his commentary on courts, judges, and judicial culture.

Harvard Law School, J.D. · Minnesota Supreme Court, Deputy Commissioner, 26+ years · Author of 59 archived essays

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