Domestic Compromise Decisions
| Jurisdiction | Colorado,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 13 No. 9 Pg. 1826 |
| Pages | 1826 |
| Publication year | 1984 |
1984, October, Pg. 1826. Domestic Compromise Decisions
The art of compromise is useful to a litigator. The ability to evaluate a case and settle within acceptable limits is beneficial to everyone involved, including the parties and the court system. The emotional trauma of litigation is avoided, the litigants' hemorrhage of money for attorneys' fees is staunched and the overburdened judges and courts are given a respite.
Compromise settlements are made easier when the parties are able to evaluate their chances at trial and accept a result within the range of what they could expect at trial. The ability to predict what might happen at trial is a most important factor in encouraging compromise settlements. Predictability, in turn, depends on some consistency in results from the courts.
However, predicting the outcome, even when there is a sense of what a court will likely do in a given situation, is a haphazard matter. Evaluation of some cases is inexact because there are always variables that affect a judge's decision as to what the facts are. Some trial judges decide cases first, and only then decide what facts support their decisions. Also, the facts of a case often depend on how persuasive a particular witness is, how sincere a particular lawyer appears to be or on various other intangibles that influence judges.
There are also those cases on which each side has taken an unreasonable position, perhaps because counsel is inexperienced or ignorant of guiding legal principles or because he is excessively zealous on behalf of a client. In some of these cases, a compromise decision might be in order.
However, there are cases about which a judge should not compromise or reach a compromised decision. These are cases where the facts are not in dispute, but a decision must be made as to whether there should be an equal or a lopsided division of assets having an agreed-upon value. One side may be reasonable and ask for an equal division of property; the other side may be greedy and ask for three-fourths of the property.
A bad decision would be a compromise between these two requests. A good decision would be an equal division---it would be good because it is a predictable decision and, would be consistent with the results in similar cases. If the judge made the decision to...
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