Magisterial District Judge Benjamin Johns will host an open house in the new Upper Darby district court complex Wednesday night in an effort to connect with the community and inform the public about how the judicial system works.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m doing this because I find this interesting and fun to talk about,\u201d Johns said during a recent interview. \u201cI mean, if you ask my family what we talk about at dinner when we have dinner together, it\u2019s usually what I\u2019ve done at court and what I\u2019ve seen. So I love talking about this stuff and I hope at the end of the session that people will come out and learn about what the MDJ courts do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Johns, 46, was elected to District Court 32-1-34 covering parts of Upper Darby Township in 2023 and took the seat in January 2024.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love it,\u201d he said of the judge role. \u201cJust getting exposed to different types of people in the township and the government, and just meeting great people across the board. I\u2019ve met a whole bunch of lawyers, and these are not people in my circles, what I do in my background. So getting the opportunity to meet very interesting people and to learn about local government in particular is interesting. I\u2019m learning all kinds of things about Upper Darby \u2014 for better, for worse \u2014 but it\u2019s a great position and I\u2019m very lucky to have it.\u201d<\/p>\n
His background<\/p>\n
Johns is a graduate of Penn State Dickinson Law \u2014 a distinction he shares with district judges Georgia Stone in Brookhaven and Gabriella Coleman of Clifton Heights \u2014 where he earned his Juris Doctorate and Master of Business Administration in 2005.<\/p>\n
Originally from Lower Merion, Johns moved to Upper Darby about 20 years ago and has been lawyering for the last 17, mostly civil matters in class actions. He was recently named managing partner at Shub Johns & Holbrook LLP, which he co-founded.<\/p>\n
The impetus for Wednesday\u2019s gathering were these sort of \u201ccheat sheets\u201d Johns kept up with for his first two years as a judge that he would update at the end of each week.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the course of that time period, I had this comprehensive outline, basically akin to when I was in law school,\u201d he said. \u201cFor every class, you start with an outline at the beginning of the semester and then by the end of the semester, you\u2019ve got like this comprehensive thing based on the classes and the assignments and stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally just a way to keep things organized and take notes, Johns thought this compendium of all things MDJ might be of some interest to others as well.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s even put together a 62-page slide presentation covering everything from the difference between civil cases and criminal cases to how search warrants are approved and judicial ethics.<\/p>\n
For his part, Johns said he tries to run a courtroom where people are given the opportunity to have their voices heard in a respectful and civil manner. He might have to steer the cart back onto the rails every now and then, he said, but there is not agenda other getting to the right result.<\/p>\n
\u2018A blank slate\u2019<\/p>\n
In nearly two decades as a lawyer, Johns said he had been in district court maybe once to get something notarized. His practice areas usually have him in federal courts, so to go from the sweeping, grand scale of the national level to the more granular, on-the-ground aspect of district court was somewhat refreshing, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was writing, essentially, on a blank slate,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve learned a lot, as you can imagine, over close to two and a half years doing this. And so that kind of coincided also with this,\u201d gesturing broadly to the new court building at 1500 Garrett Road, one large parking lot in Barclay Square away from the old court building at 1550 Garrett Road.<\/p>\n
There was some publicity about the move to the new facilities that Johns shares with Harry Karapalides (32-1-33) and Christopher Mattox (32-2-51), so he thought he would try to build on that with a little community outreach to keep the populace informed about exactly what district courts do and how they fit into the larger scheme of the justice system.<\/p>\n
This will be Johns\u2019 second bite of the apple with the slide presentation, which he recently tried out on high-schoolers at Monsignor Bonner and Upper Darby High School. It apparently went over well \u2013 one kid told him he was wants to grow up to be a judge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe target audience here is the community, the public, and I\u2019m just going to talk about what we do here, and what MDJs do, and the system, and the kind of cases that I see, and the things we do and the things we don\u2019t do,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m hoping it\u2019s going to be well attended. I\u2019ve invited pretty much everybody I know, so we\u2019ll see. I think it\u2019s going to be a fun event.\u201d<\/p>\n
The open house begins at 7 p.m. April 8 at 1500 Garrett Road in Upper Darby, around the corner from the Sav-A-Lot on the Garrett-facing side of the building.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Magisterial District Judge Benjamin Johns will host an open house in the new Upper Darby district court complex…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":157149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[46,212,182,139,28,210,147,149,148,150],"class_list":{"0":"post-157148","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upper-darby","8":"tag-courts","9":"tag-delaware-county","10":"tag-local-news","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-top-stories-dtd","14":"tag-upper-darby","15":"tag-upper-darby-headlines","16":"tag-upper-darby-news","17":"tag-upper-darby-township"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}