Book Review Have Gavel, Will Travel
| Publication year | 2015 |
| Pages | 40 |
May, 2015
Catherine Roberts, Judge.
Call me idealistic, but I have always loved America's national parks. Here are some of the things I enjoy: roughing it in a tent or little cabin in beautiful scenery, having adventures without putting oneself in too much danger, and experiencing a sense of limitless outdoor space. I grew up in the fifties and sixties, like Robert Braithwaite, the author of have Gavel, Will Travel, and our family visited national parks at that time by driving through them. I well remember Smokey the Bear's stern face warning everyone that "only you can prevent forest fires." (National parks were perhaps the only place one could emerge from the haze of cigarette smoke that seemed to shroud everything in the '50s and '60s.) My mother abhorred even the thought of camping and preferred tennis at the club to hiking; thus, we never really went off the beaten track.
Finally, in my twenties, I met the man who would become my husband and began to explore national parks and the even more pristine wilderness areas. We hiked the Sierras, walked on glaciers, and even climbed giant granite domes, although my inherent fear of heights precluded much of that. Later, we took our children to Yellowstone, Bryce, Arches, Jackson Hole, Mesa Verde, and Zion. I remember our then three-year-old son talking incessantly about visiting "voltanoes," (Yellowstone's hot pots) and then being too frightened to leave the car to see them. We hiked and fished, canoed, and rode horses, and spent way too much time in the gift shops. We spent the tail end of several summer vacations at Mammoth, in northwestern Yellowstone Park, listening to the male elk bugling to their harems and soaking in the hot springs that are just outside the Gardner, Montana entrance. It was then that I saw my fantasy law job, being a federal magistrate in a national park. The judge had a nice house, near the Mammoth Springs Hotel, and I assumed he or she would preside over all sorts of interesting issues.
Have Gavel, Will Travel describes Braithwaite's work as such a judge, and it is as interesting as one would think. A self-described student of human nature, he is a part-time United States magistrate judge who dispenses "frontier justice" in misdemeanor criminal cases and "the front end of felonies." His cases involve issues as diverse as base-jumping, big horn sheep poaching by ultralight, and...
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