New York Times – The birth of a child is a magical time, an occasion for joy, hope and, in at least one federal court, a good reason to postpone a trial over the objections of the plaintiffs’ counsel.

A federal judge in Wichita, Kan., on Tuesday granted a request to delay a civil case involving a dispute over a stock transaction. The request came from the defendant’s lawyers, who had asked Judge Eric F. Melgren to delay the trial to September from June because one of the lawyers, Bryan Erman, was expecting his first child two weeks after the trial was scheduled to start. If his wife delivers early, the brief argued, “it will be difficult for Mr. Erman to return” to his home in Dallas from the trial in Kansas City, Kan.

The judge’s action is not unusual — continuances, as they are known, are often asked for and not infrequently granted. But the plaintiffs, in a move that now seems curmudgeonly, opposed the request.

The judge’s three-page order, first reported on the legal humor Web siteLowering the Bar, is what lawyers call a “benchslap.” It opens ominously with the suggestion that the lawyers opposing the delay are the unhappy sort who “lose sight of their role as professionals, and personalize the dispute; converting the parties’ disagreement into a lawyers’ spat.”

The judge proceeded to quote Shakespeare on the proper comportment of legal adversaries, who “drive mightily, but eat and drink as friends” and noted the “famous disregard” that newborns have for schedules. “For reasons of good taste which should be (though apparently, are not) too obvious to explain,” Judge Melgren declined, with jurisprudential delicacy, to address arguments made inthe opposing brief about the date of conception.

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