Minnesota Litigator recently stumbled onto a website, “The Robing Room,” which purports to judge judges. It is worse than worthless.
Without meaning to detract from the many positive comments about many judges on the site, anonymous praise without a shred of actual information about its origin or giving it context is only slightly less useless (and potentially misleading) than anonymous (and venomous) criticism. Maybe the most repugnant aspect of such sites is that there may be a tendency for many readers to be skeptical and give little weight to one or two nasty comments but, on the other hand, to begin to draw inferences and reach conclusions from a half dozen or ten consistent comments that appear to be from different people over a span of time.
Moreover, given the constitution of human psychology, it would not be surprising if readers generally tend to give the same number of nasty comments greater credence than an identical collection of positive ones (when a slew of negative comments about a judge could be from a single moron with a dull rusty axe to grind).