Using your story for demanding that
the Biden Commission on Supreme Court reform
hear your testimony at its “public meetings”; and
asking universities and the media,
such as the news agencies Reuters, The Boston Globe, Propublica, and The Washington Post,
to let the national public hear you by holding the proposed
unprecedented citizens hearings
http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero_method_for_writing_your_story.pdf
By
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Ph.D., University of Cambridge, England
M.B.A., University of Michigan Business School
D.E.A., La Sorbonne, Paris
Judicial Discipline Reform
New York City
http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net , DrRCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org , CorderoRic@yahoo.com
A. Telling your story at the most opportune time: when people want to hear it
- This article lays out a two-phase method for you to write in up to 500 words the story of the abuse of power by judges and guardians that you have suffered or witnessed.
- Your effort in writing your story will pay off, for you will be doing so at the most opportune time: when the public, journalists, universities, and even many politicians want to hear about those stories in the context of what will soon dominate the national debate: the Commission nominated by President Biden on April 9, 2021, to study ways of reforming the Supreme Court; and the desire attributed to him and his party “to pack the Supreme Court”, that is, to increase the number of justices from 9 to 15 and reduce their life-appointment to a term of years.
B. Composing an informative and brief story to be read, heard, and investigated
- You want to tell the national public your story of judges’ abuse of power and make the public share your outrage at it. You also want your story to be investigated by journalists.
- But nobody is going to read the scores, never mind hundreds, of pages generated by your case in court to figure out what your story is all about.
- Moreover, at a hearing you will have only 5 minutes to tell your story…a rambling account will not hold the attention of the audience even that long.
- In addition, journalists will not investigate a story that is confusing and missing key pieces of information so that it fails to pique their curiosity and makes them feel that it would not interest their own audience.
- Therefore, you will benefit from applying the method set forth below for writing an informative and brief story. You will use it to rehearse your oral delivery of it at a hearing.
C. Not a professionally written story, but written after doing one’s homework
- Research your own documents and cite them so that your story is accurate and verifiable.
- Write a story that is significant to the audience: You are not writing a diary for your private reading. You are writing a story to be read by others, your audience. Organize it chronologically so that it can be easily followed by people who are totally unfamiliar with you and it.
- Highlight the most outrageous events and avoid getting bogged down in details unimportant to the story even if they are important to you. After reading it, your audience should be able to exclaim: ‘The judge in this story did A, B, and C. How outrageous!”
- Edit your writing to make it as grammatically correct as you can so that the audience’s attention is concentrated on your story without grammatical mistakes distracting it and reflecting poorly on your degree of education and attention to detail.
- Your objectives are clear: Your accurate and verifiable story earns you the respect and trust of your audience. Its significance to them earns you their gratitude. All this may makes you attain your most important objective: your audience’s action in support of your cause.
- Your audience’s support will be more likely and stronger if you apply to the writing of your story a principle of strategic thinking: “People never listen so attentively and react so positively as when they listen to avoid harm to themselves and their loved ones.”
- Make your audience feel that the abuse by judges that you suffered or witnessed can happen to them too. They can fall prey to the abusers. “No! That is unacceptable. That is outrageous! I must support this victim to end this abuse before it gets me!”
D. You need intermediaries to bring your story to the national public
- That must be the reaction of your ultimate audience: the national public. Only that public, informed about, and outraged at, judges’ unaccountability and riskless abuse of power, can force the reform not only of the Supreme Court, but also the lower federal court and even the state courts. Your story alone will not attain that objective, but it must contribute to attaining it.
- To tell your story to the national public you need the Biden Commission as well as journalists and universities to become interested in it and let you use their means for publicizing it.
- So, it is shortsighted and counterproductive to disparage the media. They are not your enemies. They are your loudspeakers. They do not form a monolithic entity. There are thousands of media outlets and tens of thousands of journalists. Not all of them have the same point of view, means, or standing: The New York Times and The Washington Post do not behave the same way as a new outfit with a handful of journalists trying to breakthrough in the world of digital investigations.
- Yet, they share a common interest: their commercial and reputational advancement. In addition, they can pick and choose among the scores of millions of people who have been abused by judges. You need journalists more than they need you. Treat all of them with respect. That is required by ethical considerations, professional standards, and strategic thinking.
E. Advice on story writing tested and applied successfully
- I have applied the advice given here to produce my three-volume study of judges and their judiciaries. The study rests on professional law research and writing, and strategic thinking. It is titled and downloadable thus:
Exposing Judges’ Unaccountability and
Consequent Riskless Abuse of Power:
Pioneering the news and publishing field of
judicial unaccountability and abuse reporting* † ♣
♣ Volume 3: http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL3/DrRCordero-Honest_Jud_Advocates3.pdf >from OL3:1144 (This article is at OL3:1329.)
- This article is also posted to my website Judicial Discipline Reform at http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org. It and similar ones have attracted so many webvisitors and the latter have reacted to them so positively that 38,962+ have become subscribers to it as of June 27, 2021(Appendix 3).
- How many law firms, never mind lawyers, do you know who have a website with so many subscribers?
- You can join the subscribers thus: go to http://www.Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org <left panel ↓Register or + New or Users >Add New.
F. The two-phase writing method
1. In phase one, use your unrestrained creative spirit to draft your story
- In the end you want to produce a story that flows smoothly into your audience’s mind and that is accurate, significant, and verifiable. But at the beginning, there is the big bang of story creation: The story bursts out of your mind chaotically onto a computer page (or paper). Anything makes its way out. Nothing is subjected to critical thought controls. If it pops up, jot it down.
- Sit at your computer and write on a word processing page whatever word, term, or phrase identifies a person, event, place, document, thing, idea, concept, etc., apparently associated with your story. They are your story’s informational dots. Each opens a crack in your mind and lets other escape.
- You are not yet trying to write grammatically correct and complete sentences. You only want to get started telling your story. Blurt anything and everything onto the page.
- Let your stream of consciousness bubble out unrestrained by your thinking mind so that it sprinkles dots of your story all over the page. As related words, terms, and phrases flow out of your mind, keep adding them to or between the other dots on the page.
- Widen and multiply the cracks in your mind by asking yourself about your story the journalists’ W-questions: What!? Who? Where? When? How? Why? What now?
- Keep asking of every word, term, phrase, and sentence concerning an event: “then what happened?…and then what did they say?…and then what did I do?…and then…?” They are alive in your mind. They can hear and answer you. They can even ask you questions.
- If informational dots or you ask questions that you cannot answer right away, only jot them down. Do not interrupt the fireworks of dots. Let it rip! Enjoy. Search for answers and evaluate their significance in phase two. Gradually questions will become more complex:
a. What was the name of the opposing party’s attorney?…and her law firm?
b. Did the judge issue an oral order from the bench or did he read one that he had written? Did he cite any law or rule?
c. Why did the judge order me to pay rent because the landlord had fixed the plumbing? I never told him; and the landlord never filed an answer! So how did the judge know? Did she confused me with another tenant? How many times has this landlord or his lawyer appeared before this judge?…Mmm. I’ll have to look into this later on.
- When you have about ten informational dots, move them up and down in a rough chronological order of appearance in your story. As you do so, add to them any other words, terms, and phrases that enlarge their meaning, identify them more narrowly, or should be inserted between them.
- Keep reading the dots, even aloud. Put them in a jingle, make them rhyme even if they make no sense…and they will come alive!, dancing in your mind and inviting to dance other words, terms, and phrases that are also dots. Let them jump onto the stage of your page.
- Something like sentences will begin to appear. Keep ordering them chronologically and inserting more dots between them or enlarging them with details.
- Painting by numbers, using stars to draw a constellation, you are connecting the dots into the sketch of a figure. It seems to be telling a story…your story! You can do this. You did it! You are telling your story!
- Use a ‘balancing test’ to compare the dots’ weight of outrageousness for the story to make sense and be significant to them: the ones who do not know you or your story. Remove to another page dots that feel of ‘lighter’ significance. You are starting to recognize a hierarchy among the dots. That will help you stay within the 500-word limit. Combine the dots into rough sentences.
- HOURS later you will feel that you have told your story from beginning to end. Let it sit for a day. You are not done, not even close: You only wrote your first draft. But you did!
2. In phase two, use your critical judgment to edit your story
- Come back to your draft and read it through. Only thereafter start moving around and connecting the sentences in a way that will make sense to a person who does not know anything about it.
- Avoid confusing your audience: Use the same word to refer to the same person, idea, event, object, etc. Double check your dates; the names of places, people, and their titles. Make sure who said what to whom. Do not trust your memory. Case and other documents. Research the law to provide citations. Journalists will check them and you must ensure that they can verify them. Be accurate.
- Right now you are writing for an audience of journalists. They are knowledgeable, critical, and demanding. But they do not know anything about your story. Do not assume that they can fill in the details that you left out that are necessary for your story to make sense to them.
- Try to the best of your ability to tell them a story that persuades them of the outrageousness of unaccountable judges’ riskless abuse of power. But do not be melodramatic; do not exaggerate.
- Never make up details. Always make a clear distinction between facts, opinion, and impressions. Admit that you do not know what you do not know. You may be able to tell a lie as to a dot here or there. But journalists look at the whole picture and realize how false dots do not fit in. Lie-ridden mouths are not invited to tell their story. Even if you did not intend to provide false details, as when lying, but your details are incorrect for failure to check them against documents and other sources, you become an unreliable storyteller. You lose credibility. Never compromise it.
- Self-editing means revising and rewriting your draft story; and correcting your grammar and the position of paragraphs, sentences, and clauses. It will take longer than drafting it: Dots were connected into a sketch. Now you are painting the sketch with the colors of accuracy, verifiability, and significance that reveal the outrageousness of the abuse of power of the judges in your story.
a. What to omit
- Abstain from outbursts intended to elicit pity and appeal for commiseration. Do not appear emotionally fragile, unstable, or hypersensitive. Do not come across as a basket case.
- Do not dilute your story’s significance with trivial details and petty grievances. A barrage of charges betrays incapacity to identify what is legally relevant. Do not diminish the credibility of your story with unfounded accusations, speculation, and extravagant claims. Trying to turn your experience into a nightmare does not make for a serious story; you are not scripting a horror movie.
- Do not impair your story’s verifiability by making unprovable claims. Fantasy allegations make your story a fairy tale. Let independent investigators reveal what coming from a party –and as such biased toward her side of the story− sounds preposterous. Turn ‘reality that is stranger than fiction’ into a question that becomes a lead for investigative journalists:
a. Did the judge put his kids on food stamps although he earns a judges’ salary?!
b. Did he have his niece hired by the winning party to have her pay his gambling debts?
c. Does he tell his law clerks that if at the end of their clerkship when they search for a job they want him to write them a glowing letter of recommendation, which can earn them a substantial sign-up bonus from the hiring employer, they have to decide the cases assigned to him and write the decisions, which explains why the style of the decisions signed by him is so oddly different every year after the start of the new clerkship? - Also leave out anything on which honest people can reasonably hold different opinions. It falls within the judges’ wide margin of discretion. Your opinion is not entitled to more credibility than the judges’, especially since you are not a lawyer, but rather a biased party, as all parties are.
b. What to include
- Focus on the judges’ violation of criminal law, which their fellow judges will not want to appear defending, lest they dirty their own image: e.g.,
a. denial of due process and equal protection of the law;
b. conflict of interests;
c. abuse of public office and confidential information for self-enrichment;
d. bribery;
e. bankruptcy fraud, concealment of assets, tax evasion, and money laundering;
f. interception of people’s mail and emails to detect and suppress those critical of judges; disregard of rules of conduct;
g. cronyism;
h. cover-up;
i. ethnic, racial, socio-economic, gender, or religious bias;
j. physical or sexual abuse;
k. arbitrariness; and
l. what offends the common sense of decency and propriety. - Provide pieces of information, e.g., names and dates, that can be treated as data: They can be scanned into a database to find the most convincing type of evidence: patterns of abuse by judges and their cronies, formed by their recurrence in the stories separately provided by different people.
- Let your story sit for a day or two. Come back to it for another phase-two session. You are writing your story to tell it first to journalists; and if it passes muster, they will bring it to the national public. Eventually it will be the basis for your claim for compensation. What you say now binds you later on. Do what it takes to get your story right. It must be accurate, verifiable, and significant.
G. Title, subtitle, and theme of the story
- After writing your story, you will recognize a theme running through it. Turn it into the title that expresses the nature of your story and its main takeaway.
- In general, the theme of your story and that of the other witnesses is “judges’ unaccountability and consequent riskless abuse of power”. In particular, emphasize, whether in the title and certainly throughout the story, the judges’ three most outrageous acts. “If the most cannot do it, the lesser need not try.” There follow sample titles that summarize their respective story in a sentence:
How a judge failed to recuse himself from a case where he approved the foreclosure on an apartment building, the eviction of all the tenants, and its conversion into an office building by a development company in which he is a shareholder
How a judge once more declared another wealthy senior citizen incompetent and appointed as her guardian a person to whom he regularly entrusts guardianships, who squeezed every penny from her, and then dumped her onto the state welfare system as an indigent
How a bankruptcy judge allowed the same bankruptcy trustee to hold yet another unannounced auction where only one and the same bidder showed up, bought the debtor’s assets for pennies on the dollar, flipped them, and made a killing…
leaving me as the financial corpse
Bonfire of integrity at the penthouse: Judges attending a judicial conference boasted about how they cut corners on the law, use parties’ information to enrich themselves and their partners, and have clerks fudge documents; and were overheard by the apparently invisible waiters and waitresses serving them, who reported them to their chief circuit judge; and although the chief deemed their reports complaints, she dismissed them without the waiters and waitresses ever being interviewed as part of any investigation
H. Additional information in links embedded in text and as endnotes
- It is assumed that you will email your story. Attachments to them are risky because when opened they can release a virus into the recipient’s computer. As a result, some email computers (servers) do not accept for delivery emails with attachments. Do not send them.
- Instead, turn a reference to a person, event, place, document, etc., into a linking blue keyword, which holds embedded in it a ‘hidden’, not visible, link to a supporting document: Click on the keyword >in the dropdown menu click on the word Hyperlink >in the box type in the hyperlink >click enter. The keyword should turn blue indicating that it has an embedded link.
- Be reasonable: do not mar your story with dozens of blue words. Use your good judgment to identify the documents whose links should be embedded. If readers need more supporting documents, they can ask you for them. Store the linked documents either on your website, DropBox, Google Plus, Academia, or any other cloud storage facility.
- If need be, you may provide at the end of your story a “List of links to supporting documents”. Add a brief description of what the corresponding document deals with.
- Include in the list the documents of the opposing party and the decisions of the judges in your case. Be fair. Let them ‘talk’ too. Be helpful: spare journalists and other readers the need to search for those documents, which should be at your fingertips because you received them and should have read them. Do not give the impression that you are hiding the other side of the story or that you are so self-centered and small-minded that you think your story only has one side: yours.
I. Sign and date your story
- If your address, telephone number, and email address were not stated at the top of your story, state that information at the end of it. Show that you take responsibility for your story.
- Moreover, your contact information will facilitate getting in touch with you to ask for any needed clarification or additional information.
- Provide the date when you submit your story. That information is useful, in general, to order documents chronologically and, in particular, to establish your story’s currency, i.e., its ‘as of date’.
J. Advocates’ reciprocal revision of their stories, checklist, and chapters
- Before submitting your story, share it with the Advocates of Honest Judiciaries to whom I send my articles –see the To: and cc: boxes of my emails and OL2:1140¶28–. Ask that they provide feedback on it just as you offer to do the same if they share with you their story.
- A competition for the title of “Protagonist of the Worst Abuse by Judges Ever” or the attitude “My story is more importan that yours cuz it effects more people” does not improve any story. They are egocentric and wasteful of everybody’s effort, goodwill, and time.
- Cooperate to identify and rephrase, eliminate, or correct what is inaccurate, insignificant, or unverifiable; ambiguous; inconsistent; contradictory; digressive; repetitive; pretentious; self-aggrandizing; defamatory; a poor word choice; trite; in bad taste; foul language, which is impermissible; misspelled; unidiomatic; wrong syntax (word order); ungrammatical; etc.
- All of you can draw up a “Checklist and Evaluation Form for Stories of Abuse of Power by Judges”. It can be used when composing the proposed Annual Report on Judicial Unaccountability and Abuse of Power in America.
- Reciprocal revisions will afford you the opportunity to know each other. You and others can form a chapter of Advocates who promote in turn the formation of a national, civic, single issue movement for judicial abuse of power exposure, compensation of victims, and reform.
K. Blocs of email addresses where to send your story
- When you are ready to send your story, copy the bloc of email addresses below and paste it in the corresponding box of your email:
To [for the commissioners of the Biden Commission]:
cristina.rodriguez@yale.edu, robert.bauer@nyu.edu, kandrias@umich.edu, jack.balkin@yale.edu, RBauer@perkinscoie.com, baude@uchicago.edu, madams@yu.edu, charles@law.duke.edu, acrespo@law.harvard.edu, wdellinger@omm.com, ecb95@law.rutgers.edu, justin.driver@yale.edu, rfallon@law.harvard.edu, heather.k.gerken@yale.edu, ngertner@law.harvard.edu, jgoldsmith@law.harvard.edu, tgriffith@law.harvard.edu, tgrove@law.ua.edu, bhuang@law.columbia.edu, mkang@northwestern.edu, ojohns@law.columbia.edu, lacroix@uchicago.edu, lemos@law.duke.edu, levi@law.duke.edu, trevor.morrison@nyu.edu, cnelson@law.virginia.edu, rick.pildes@nyu.edu, mramsey@SanDiego.edu, krooseve@law.upenn.edu, d-strauss@uchicago.edu, bross@law.berkeley.edu, tribe@law.harvard.edu, awhite36@gmu.edu, kewhitt@princeton.edu, development@naacpldf.org, michael.waldman@nyu.edu, caroline.fredrickson@georgetown.edu, DrRCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org,
cc [for journalists]:
“Veterans Today Senior Editor Gordon Duff” <gpduf@aol.com>, “Veterans Today Managing Editor Jim W Dean” <jimwdean@aol.com>, ajaffe@thehill.com, john.shiffman@thomsonreuters.com, michael.berens@thomsonreuters.com, blake.morrison@thomsonreuters.com, “Todd Wallack” <twallack@gmail.com>, “Brian McGrory Editor” <brian.mcgrory@globe.com>, contact@go.reuters.com, charles.ornstein@propublica.org, tracy.weber@propublica.org, spotlight@globe.com, tips@thomsonreuters.com, Thehill@email.thehill.com, patricia.wen@globe.comrs.com, marketresearch.thomsonreuters@thomsonreuters.com, ijerr@spectacularjournals.org, newstip@globe.com, newsletters@abovethelaw.com, drew@americanthinker.com, tips@publicintegrity.org, emily.holden@theguardian.com, NTotenberg@npr.org, ryan.grim@theintercept.com, andrea@americanthinker.com, Laura.Crimaldi@globe.com, inytletters@nytimes.com, info@elizabethwarren.com, Evan.Allen@globe.com, info@AP.org, Elizabeth_Warren@warren.senate.gov, ginger.thompson@propublica.org, mcnulaj@nytimes.com, MCoyle@alm.com, communication@lexisnexis.com, aglantz@stanford.edu, watchdog@publicintegrity.com, mderienzo@publicintegrity.org, joepatrice@abovethelaw.com, info@mail.huffpost.com, tips@thedailybeast.com, tips@latimes.com, aturturro@alm.com, Opencourt@cnn.com, letters@nytimes.com, contact_us@spectacularjournals.org, Matt.Rocheleau@globe.com, oped@nytimes.com, jmaxeiner@ubalt.edu, Jackie.Botts@thomsonreuters.com, hello@propublica.org, Jaimi.Dowdell@thomsonreuters.com, tips@propublica.org, Vernal.Coleman@globe.com, Brendan.McCarthy@globe.com, Andrew.Chung@thomsonreuters.com, Lawrence.Hurley@thomsonreuters.com, Andrea.Januta@thomsonreuters.com,
- Post the article to social media, such as: Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google Plus, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, WhatsApp
Twitter: Request that the Biden Commission on Supreme Court reform hold public meetings & journalists and universities hold citizens hearings where people can tell their story of judges’ abuse of power; http://Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org/OL2/DrRCordero_method_for_writing_your_story.pdf
- Precede your story with this professional letterhead and introduction (which have 483 words and should give you an idea of the length of your story):
Your name and address,
phone number; email address
The Biden Commission on Supreme Court reform;
Investigative journalists; and
Advocates of Honest Judiciaries
Dear Commissioners, Journalists, and Advocates,
Kindly find below my story of the abuse of power by judges that I have suffered and/or witnessed.
I am sending it to support my request that you hear me and similarly situated abusees at the “public meetings” that the Commission is mandated to hold. You should allow your “meetings” and your report to inform the national public of how justices and judges behave in practice, abusing their power for their gain and convenience because they are unaccountable and their abuse is riskless.
By contrast, if you limit yourself to a mere discussion of the theory of constitutional law on the Supreme Court, you will have allowed yourselves to be manipulated as a pretext for implementing the foregone political decision to “pack the Court”.
I also request that you journalists join forces with journalism, Information Technology, and business academics to expose judicial abuse of power at the unprecedented citizens hearings proposed by Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
At those hearings, multidisciplinary panels of journalists and academics can take the testimony of abusees. They can do so life at media stations and university auditoriums across the country as well as via video conference to make it inexpensive and convenient for them and the public to attend. This can launch a MeToo!-like trend of public accountability here and abroad.
It is overdue: In the 232 years since the creation of the Federal Judiciary in 1789, the number of federal judges impeached and removed is only 8! For comparison, the number of federal officers on the bench on September 30, 2020, was 2,341. Federal judges need not fear losing their jobs. In practice, they have turned public power entrusted to them into the power of a State above the state.
The “meetings” and the citizens hearings can expose the nature, extent, and gravity of judges’ abuse. On that factual basis, the reform can be undertaken of not only the Supreme Court, where in the October 2019-September 2020 fiscal year only “73 cases were argued and 69 were disposed of in 53 signed opinions”, but also the lower federal courts, which terminated 1,103,337(page 10) in the year to September 30, 2020.
The citizens hearings can be expanded to take the testimony of victims of state judges, who are just as outrageous in their abuse of power.
The hearings can thus lead to a reform that takes from judges the unaccountability that they have arrogated to themselves and gives back to We the People, the Masters of all public servants, what is our birthright: government by the rule of law where the People exercise their right to hold also their judicial public servants accountable for entrusted power and liable to compensate the victims of their abuse.
Therefore, I request the opportunity to be heard also at the citizens hearings.
Date: Name:
L. My offer to present this articles
- I offer to make a presentation on this article to you and your group of guests followed by a Q&A session. It can take place via video conference and, if in New York City, in person.
- To ascertain the quality of my presentation, watch my video and follow it on its slides.
- To schedule it and agree on its terms, use my contact information below.
M. Every meaningful cause needs resources for its advancement;
none can be continued, let alone advanced, without money
Put your money
where your outrage at abuse and
passion for justice are.
Donate
to support the professional law research and writing, and
strategic thinking of
Judicial Discipline Reform
through Paypal
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=HBFP5252TB5YJ;
by making a deposit or an online transfer to Citi Bank,
routing # 021 000 089, account # 4977 59 2001; or
by mailing a check to the address below.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Dr. Richard Cordero, Esq.
Judicial Discipline Reform
2165 Bruckner Blvd.
Bronx, NY 10472-6506
tel. (718)827-9521
Dr.Richard.Cordero_Esq@verizon.net, DrRCordero@Judicial-Discipline-Reform.org, CorderoRic@yahoo.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-richard-cordero-esq-0508ba4b
Dare trigger history!…and you may enter it.
NOTE: Given the interference with Dr. Cordero’s email and e-cloud storage accounts described at *>ggl:1 et seq. and †>OL2:1114§G, when emailing him, copy the above bloc of his email addresses and paste it in the To: line of your email so as to enhance the chances of your email reaching him at least at one of those addresses.


