The judge who remembered the typewriter
When Robert L. Trout looked back on thirty-one years in Division 32, he remembered clerks making dockets on IBM Selectrics and stacks of traffic tickets carried into court.
From Lone Jack to Division 32
Trout studied at William Jewell College and the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law. He served as a municipal judge in Lone Jack. Governor John Ashcroft appointed him an associate circuit judge in Independence in 1987. Missouri’s 2008 judicial performance evaluation gives the contemporary assessment. The circuit’s October 2018 retirement notice supplies a different source, Trout’s own recollections.
Why the small claims mattered
Trout singled out the variety of small claims and the opportunity to speak directly to people representing themselves. He described explaining the law to a person who had lost. For a historian, the resulting judgment and the judge’s recollection preserve different things. One records an enforceable decision. The other tells us what a judge believed he owed the person leaving the room. Both belong in the civic history of Independence.
Small disputes in Independence belong to the political history of the place. My own litigation has given me a particular appreciation of a written account a losing party can actually understand.