A judge's role

...Coffin's last chapters are devoted to a commentary on the evolving and increasingly heavy Federal appellate case load and an inquiry into tne legitimacy of judicial decision making...

...They thus have an enormous impact on the direction of the law, and they are increasingly asked to decide important social and political issues...

...Coffin stands at a considerable distance from the jaded realpolitik of The Brethren, Woodward and Armstrong's bestseller about the Supreme Court...

...Coffin's description of the basic requirements for judging appeals is particularly revealing of his approach...

...Although their decisions are reviewable in the Supreme Court, the high court hears only two or three per cent of these cases...

...He describes how he and other judges (court of appeals cases are usually decided by panels of three) struggled with an 1899 Supreme Court decision that defined smuggling as bringing goods on land, which suggests that a person caught at sea cannot be guilty of smuggling...

...The third case was brought by inmates at a state prison who were transferred to another prison after they were anonymously accused of starting a series of fires at the first prison...

...He describes the role of an appellate judge and the historical development of a legal structure permitting defeated parties to take their case to a higher court...

...He explains the special burdens of understanding the often lengthy and complex administrative record in judicial challenges to agency decisions...

...Readers of The Progressive no doubt remember the struggle to publish Howard Morland's article about the hydrogen bomb...

...The Progressive's appeal of an unprecedented Federal district court order enjoining the article's publication was ultimately dismissed and publication permitted...

...Here is a man who sees the judge's role as an intense intellectual and personal experience, who changes his mind frequently before arriving at a decision, and who obviously loves his work...

...But when litigation is necessary, it helps to know how judges think...

...Coffin uses three illustrative cases to show how a judge approaches a case, what he or she looks for in briefs and oral argument, and how competing legal arguments are evaluated to arrive at a decision...

...Although judges are creatures of their social background and values, he writes, the "prerequisite quality is objectivity...

...The second was a pharmaceutical company's challenge to a Food and Drug Administration decision to withdraw the company's weight control drug from the market...

...Lawyers who represent disadvantaged minorities and individuals have long known that going to court is a poor substitute for political power or effective organization...

...Although most ligitation once involved private parties and affected relatively few people, cases now taken to appellate courts involve more public law issues and have far greater impacts...

...Although this old case ran against Coffin's own views of the matter, he writes that he gradually came to see that there was no respectable way to ignore it...

...But for many months the magazine's fate was in the hands of three Federal court of appeals judges in Chicago...

...The number of filings in Federal courts of appeal increased from 3,800 in 1960 to 21,680 in 1979...

...The Ways of a Judge is also a book about a man and his work...

...Coffin's book goes a long way on that score...

...The bulk of the book is devoted to describing the process by which a Federal appellate court decides cases...

...This, after all, is the judge's reason for being...

...My only reservation about this enlightening and useful book is that Coffin often seems to be writing about an ideal situation rather than an actual one...

...Frank Coffin wrote The Ways of a Judge to increase public understanding of the process of judging appellate cases, and to suggest standards by which judges should be measured...

...They hear appeals from Federal district or trial courts and final decisions of administrative agencies...

...But since he is both describing the process of judging and prescribing standards for measuring judges, it seems inevitable that what is and what should be frequently fuse or overlap...

...These judges, and their colleagues throughout the country, occupy an important position in the Federal judicial system...

...Part of this, no doubt, is due to the circumspection of his account...

...Although the Government's attempt to prevent publication of that article raised many political issues, the focal point of the controversy was this magazine's legal right to free speech under the First Amendment...

...He details the problems of charting a proper course in the rapidly evolving area of procedural due process guarantees for prisoners...

...His thoughtful and insightful book is based on his fifteen years as a judge on the court of appeals for the First Circuit, half of them as chief judge...

...The first case involved a defendant convicted of aiding and abetting the smuggling of several dozen bales of marijuana in a coastal yacht...

...Coffin describes his enthusiasm in drafting an opinion (even though a case had been poorly argued by both sides), the workings of collegiality (an unofficial rule on his court forbids a judge from criticizing another's draft without providing substitute language), and the intellectual challenge of deciding how far to push particular principles...

...John Dernbach (John Dernbach is co-author of "A Practical Guide to Legal Writing and Legal Method," to be published this summer...