Most litigators will at some point face a situation in which they must decide whether to seek disqualification of a judge for cause. This can be quite a perilous predicament. Clients are entitled to a fair adjudication by an impartial judge, and may suffer undeserved harm if a biased judge decides a case. So disqualification should be sought in appropriate circumstances.
But seeking disqualification for cause generally requires a lawyer to allege a judge is doing or has done something wrong. Such allegations may upset a judge and harm the lawyer’s work before the judge, even in future, unrelated cases. For this reason, lawyers discussing judicial disqualification often paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If you are going to shoot at a king you had better kill him.”
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