Mr. Fine's burst of sustained irrationality is difficult to fathom. Fine reportedly missed the filing deadline by a single day because he miscalculated the calendar, but then he filed an affidavit of attorney fault so that his client's case would not be dismissed due to this error, as opposing counsel had moved. Judge Yaffe nonetheless did dismiss the case of Fine's client (after the client had obtained other counsel), but immediately provided relief from the dismissal so Fine's client suffered no harm. Judge Yaffe then turned his attention to assessing the "reasonable compensatory legal fees and costs" for which Mr. Fine was personally liable, and his behavior became even more bizarre.
Mr. Fine may have been seized by a deep irrationality to embrace principle belatedly even while abandoning both the law and common sense. This is when, lacking the standing to do so (because he was neither attorney-of-record not a party to the case-in-chief), he demanded that Judge Yaffe recuse himself from the case. This is when Fine further abandoned the law by ignoring Yaffe's admonition that his ruling on the recusal demand was not subject to appeal by Mr. Fine, who was told that his only possible remedy was to file a timely writ of mandate, which Fine refused to do. From this point on in the proceeding, Mr. Fine's behavior became grossly irrational, pseudo-principled, and made him legally vulnerable to any ill will that Judge Yaffe may have chosen to express through official and by then legally sanctified actions.
A closer examination of Mr. Fine's behavior underscores the depth of his irrationality, passion and impaired judgment. Fine had waited over eight months after initiating the civil action on his client's behalf to demand Judge Yaffe's disqualification, and he threw in the demand that every judge on the Los Angeles Superior Court be disqualified. Although Fine's lack of standing to demand Yaffe's disqualification was a dispositive ground for denial, Judge Yaffe rejected it for other reasons as well:
In an order filed March 18, 2008, Judge Yaffe ordered the disqualification stricken (1) as giving insufficient notice, (2) because it was not filed by a party or [current] attorney for a party, (3) because a challenge may only be made against a presiding judge and not all judges, (4) because it was untimely, and (5) because it "disclosed on its face no legal grounds for disqualification."
Then, after Judge Yaffe advised Mr. Fine of the only available legal recourse to dispute his rejection of the demand, Mr. Fine ignored that advice and again simply filed another notice of disqualification as though he, Fine, and not established law, controlled proceedings. Or, to put it tendentiously, Fine behaved as though he were in touch with, and guided by, an imaginary Higher Law that only he could understand and appreciate. Thus, Mr. Fine's subsequent sustained burst of irrationality may well reflect deeper and more abiding components of characterlogical functioning of a similar sort, here possibly stressed to the point of at least a minor breakdown in reality testing.
Mr. Fine has filed pleadings claiming that he was denied notice of the January 8, 2008 hearing in which Judge Yaffe initially ordered him to pay costs, hence that the assignation of costs has no authority and violates constitutional guarantees of due process. Fine's claim appears to be a double distortion. Because Mr. Fine was no longer attorney of record, there may have been no no obligation to notify him of a hearing whose primarily purpose was to rule on the motion to dismiss the civil case. At that hearing Judge Yaffe also, following CCP 473 (b), ordered Fine to pay reasonable compensatory legal fees and costs, but these costs were determined after opposing counsel filed a memorandum of costs and Mr. Fine submitted two "motions to tax costs" in response, i.e., motions that challenge the stated costs. As Judge Carla Woehrle noted in her motion to deny Fine's writ of habeas corpus:
On April 10, 2008, a hearing was convened on Petitioner's motions to tax costs, but when he refused to proceed, claiming that Judge Yaffe had been disqualified, the motions were taken off calendar. [Judgment & Order at 6.] (Emphasis added.)
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