Abbott

J.Sometimes, because of congested court dockets and scheduling difficulties, the “direct calendar” judge who is assigned a case for all purposes is not the judge who conducts the trial. Such a reassignment can lead, as happened in the present case, to trouble. Certain pairs of proceedings must be heard by the same judge if he or she is able to do so: for example, trials and new trial motions. (See Code Civ. Proc., § 661.) The judge who presided at trial is obviously the best qualified to determine the validity of the new trial motion and it makes no sense to have another judge hear it. The same goes for the pair of proceedings in the case before us now: a mistrial and a request for sanctions brought against a litigant for causing that mistrial, As a matter of commonsense judicial administration and Supreme Court precedent governing the analogous area of new trial motions, we hold that, absent inability, the judge who declares a mistrial must also hear any request for sanctions against anyone causing that mistrial.

In this case, a different judge from the one who declared the mistrial considered a sanction motion based on the mistrial, which allegedly resulted from a…