From the Wool-sack
| Publication year | 1976 |
| Pages | 1481 |
| Citation | Vol. 5 No. 9 Pg. 1481 |
1976, October, Pg. 1481. From the Wool-Sack
Some people are envious of people in authority who get to make rules. These people think that making rules is all fun and no work. My readers will not be surprised to learn that those who thusly think are wrong. In fact, the making of rules is a heavy responsibility which most of us could not properly exercise if it were given to us, and all of us are blessed to be spared. As anyone who has ever had a scintilla of authority (or even one child) knows, it is not enough to make rules. In order for rules to be any good you have to make a second set of rules to enforce the first set and those are called "sanctions." It is fairly easy to make rules, as this column will demonstrate, but making sanctions is harder. To those of you who are jealous of people who make rules and sanctions and wish you could do this, let me give you an example of how hard it is and henceforth you will not hunger after another's food.
Some time ago the Colorado Supreme Court decided that all lawyers should be equipped not only with typewriters, dictating equipment and the legal skills we acquired in law school, but with numbers. It probably came as no surprise to anyone that because the numbers cost $20.00 each there were two kinds of lawyers who declined to purchase them:
(a) those who didn't like having numbers affixed to themselves because they feared loss of identity, and (b) those who didn't like parting with $20.00. As a result of the lawyers' reluctance to follow the Court's rule it was necessary for the Court to devise the second set of rules known as "sanctions."
It is not an easy task if you have over three hundred rules to administer, as the Supreme Court has, to decide where to place a punishment (which is what a sanction is) on lawyers who fail to get, or having got, to use, numbers. The court lit upon Rule 11 of the Colorado Rules of Civil Procedure as the place to impose a sanction. It provided that if the current registration number of an attorney was not included with his signature on a pleading the pleading would be stricken and the action would proceed as if the pleading had not been filed. (Lamentably, the court deleted from Rule 11 the words that the pleading would be stricken as "sham...
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