The American dream was dissolving in the cold florescent light of the Charleston County Courthouse on Tuesday morning. The benches were full of people waiting for foreclosure hearings. After twenty-five years of legal practice, most spent in the unhappy chambers of Family Court in hearings about divorce, custody, child abuse and juvenile delinquency, I was shocked to discover hell has a basement.

The old saying about having your day in court fades from practice and memory. Judges are expensive. Each needs a clerk and a secretary. A bailiff or guard must help keep order, sometimes two. A court reporter must be present to take down and preserve testimony. Clerks must receive, file and keep track of records. Beyond that, cars must be parked, healthcare and pensions must be funded, and at the end of the day someone must sweep up and take out the trash. A functional judge and courtroom to decide serious cases on the record costs well over a million dollars a year.

I would call someone to get the exact figure, but the people who answer those questions have been laid off.

The state of South Carolina has been unwilling to pay the cost of additional judges for the past 20 years. Huge efforts have been made to divert cases to mediation and arbitration to reduce costs. Filing fees have been increased 600 percent. Judges work ever harder to schedule and optimize the use of court time. However, in the end, less and less time is available per case to consider the issues and evidence. Criminal guilty pleas are often taken in groups of a dozen. Divorces, which once took half an hour, are now often done in five minutes.

On Tuesday, two large real estate investment organizations went first, each wrestling with the bank over what had happened to their multimillion dollar game of musical chairs when the band stopped playing. None of the well paid lawyers present for Defendants or bank was fully prepared. Nobody had been willing to pay the lawyers to do the work. In one case, those present didn't know if they had a first or second mortgage on one of the properties, though absolute proof of that was on file at the records office next door. It wasn't clear which of the many properties were still part of the case and which had been uncoupled before the train wreck.

While 25 people waited to learn when and how they would lose their homes, Judge Mikell R. Scarborough patiently fixed those two "big" cases. There had been big plans to build something with someone else's money, to sell to someone who never showed up to buy it with still more money from someone else in hopes of selling it for even more later to another somebody who turned out to be nobody.

All of this was supposed to be a way to create wealth while burning $500 billion in imported oil a year, importing nearly everything we use and attempting to preserve the expensive illusion that Herman Karzai is the George Washington of Afghanistan.

A nation prospers by making what it needs, taking care of its kids and keeping its soldiers at home and the soldiers of other countries at their home. Peace, posterity and productivity are a set you can't break up for long.

To his great credit, after the judge had cleared away the complicated and neglected mess of the big real estate deals, he told everyone in the room that he was ready to hear their story. Death in the family, getting fired, healthcare problems and divorces don't get you off the legal hook with your mortgage company. The court could just listen to the bank's objections that the background was irrelevant and sign off on the sales, one after the other.

Instead, the judge decided to use the courts overtaxed time to return some dignity to the people who were losing so much. My client had the first story, about a 20-year career of work which ended when all the work did. I felt he went on a little too long, but it's hard for someone to stop when they are explaining why they lost their house. Though it made no difference, the judge listened because someone should listen, because a world of indifference to such suffering would be intolerable for us all.

We left before the next story. The judge stayed and continued the hard struggle to listen. I'm grateful the judge does his best. The banks, which are using our money for free, can well afford to pay to be sure their attorneys are ready for the hearings requested. They can afford to pay the costs of bringing a few retired judges back to the bench to spread out the workload and misery. We have empty courtrooms available. More time and dignity are needed.

Until then, I believe the judge will do his best.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On Village.)