A View from the Bench.

• Author: Mikva, Abner J.

(*) A View From The Beach. Joseph Wapner. Simon & Schuster, $17.95.

Why Judge Wapner is bad for America

Strick Nielsenism by Abner J. Mikva

Judge Joseph Wapner is not a modest man. Even in the black-robe league of judges past and present, where modesty is always in short supply, the paucity of his humility is remarkable. I suppose that he can point to his daytime television audience, 20 million strong, as warrant for his absolute certainly that he is worth all the self-acclaim detailed in his recent auto-vanity.(*)

I have watched Judge Wapner's television show only once or twice but have been irritated far more frequently at the amount of legal disinformation that television viewers claim to have acquired from regular watching of "People's Court." It is always possible, I tell myself, that the television viewers misinterpret what Judge Wapner says (just as lawyers sometimes misinterpret what real-life judges say.) After all, the man had been a real judge before leaving for the fame and fortune of the television courtroom.

On reading the book, I realize that I have been too hard on Wapner's television audience. He does indeed have a certificate about his passions and prejudices that allows him to proclaim some very dubious rules of law when he pronounces on the cases before him, after the commercial break.

"I was not always a judge," our author tells us, perhaps to relieves us of any suspicion that he sprang fully robed from the womb of Athena. He recounts his early childhood in a middle-class neighborhood. He even acknowledges graduation from law school. But nowhere in his disussion of his formative years is there the slightest clue about the origin of some of the unjudgely notions that Judge Wapner regularly dispenses.

Judge Wapner's idosyncratic view of criminal law is illustrated by a war tale he recounts from his real-life days in the California court system. A drifter is tried for...