Monday, Aug. 20, 1979

"We may well be on our way to a society overrun by hordes of lawyers, hungry as locusts, and brigades of judges in numbers never before contemplated." --Chief Justice Warren E. Burger

Last year TIME cited the Chief Justice's grim prediction in a cover story about "Those #@!!! Lawyers." The cover this week examines the second object of Burger's concern, His Honor's increasingly powerful colleagues on the bench. To assess the rapid expansion of judicial authority in the U.S. and the delays, anachronisms and inefficiencies that plague the nation's courts, TIME correspondents interviewed dozens of lawyers and judges across the country, including the studiously reclusive Chief Justice himself. Reports Washington Correspondent Doug Brew: "Chatting with Burger in a quiet corner of his office while he attentively pours coffee from a silver pot reveals an often overlooked human side of the man. He says he is astonished that there have not been more heart attacks among overworked judges, and his own tired, red-lidded eyes underscore the burdens of Justices in a way that words and papers never could."

Staff Writer Evan Thomas, who wrote this week's cover story and helped report last year's on lawyers, had his first, rather bizarre encounter with a judge in 1975. As a reporter for the Bergen County, N.J., Record, he was interviewing a group of teen-agers after a gang fight in Little Ferry, N.J., when he was arrested on the highly original charge of "inciting to loiter."

By the time the case came before a judge nine months later, Thomas was ready to mount a powerful and eloquent defense, having completed most of his first year at the University of Virginia law school. "Fortunately," he says, "the judge dismissed my case. But not without proclaiming that 'this doesn't mean the court thinks there is anything noble about the press.' " Ignoring that wisdom, Thomas came to TIME shortly after receiving his J.D. in 1977, joining Reporter-Researcher Raissa Silverman in the magazine's Law section. This fall Thomas will move to TIME'S Washington bureau to cover what Correspondent Brew calls "the most underreported branch of Government -- the Judiciary." Says former Defendant Thomas of his new assignment: "The subject is not exactly unfamiliar."

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