Yield

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What is it like to be a judge? At nearly every event I attend, people ask me that.My short answer is: Great! or It's fine! What it is like to be a judge is much too complex to be answered in any brief manner.Shortly after I was elected as judge in Harris County, (Houston, Texas) Criminal Court No. 5, I attended New Judges' School in Dallas with other newly elected judicial colleagues from all over Texas. One December evening, our instructors dis-cussed selecting one or more of us to keep a diary about our first-year experiences on the bench in upcoming 1999.Although I wasn't selected to keep a diary to read to new Texas judges in a future year, the suggestion gave me the idea for this book. I kept such a daily diary: detailed, meticulous, contemporaneous, unfailing. There is something voyeuristic about reading someone else's diary, verbal eavesdropping-forbidden fruit. Reaching in the closed drawer for the book when the author is absent, surreptitiously reading the very personal entries. My other inspiration for Yield was best-selling author Scott Turow's first book, One L, based on a journal Turow secretly kept during his first year as a student at Harvard Law School. In 1970, The Making of a Surgeon, a diary-like book by Dr. William A. Nolen, made a popular literary splash as the memoir of an apprentice physician."In baseball it's the rookie year. In the navy it is boot camp. In many walks of life there is a similar time of trial and initiation, a period where newcomers are forced to be the victims of their own ineptness and when they must somehow master the basic skills of the profession in order to survive, " Turow writes in his preface to One L. In my writing effort, I had at least two advantages most judges don't have: I worked as a print journalist for about 14 years before becoming an attorney and judge. (See "About the Author" at the end of Yield.) And I had served for about three years as a part-time associate judge in Houston's busy municipal court-not the same as full-time county criminal court, but helpful as background.