WASHINGTON (AP) - By title, job description, the solemnity of the black robe, the authority of the gavel, judges are cast as figures a step beyond everyday behavior.  But they aren't immune from job stress that can build to the point of angry outbursts from the bench.

"Bench stress," the American Bar Association Journal calls it in an account suggesting a growing recognition of the problem and the need to redress it when it happens.

The marathon trial and acquittal of O.J. Simpson have put a focus on what's happening in American courtrooms.  Compared with conduct described in the ABA study, Judge Lance Ito was a judicial saint.

In the study, Pamela Coyle tells of an angry Philadelphia judge who threw a glass of water at a lawyer and one in Louisiana who told a witness that in his courtroom he was God.

A Long Island judge sent unsigned letters and faxes ridiculing and at times threatening an attorney with whom he'd had political differences.

With confidence in the judicial system shaken even before the Simpson trial, conduct described as "black robe fever" by the president of the National Judicial College in Reno, Nev., can only worsen the problem.

"This whole area of demeanor is so important, "Judge V. Robert Payani told Coyle.  "There is a growing recognition by the judiciary that if we are going to improve the image of justice... one group of major players is going to have to be judges."

Another may be a growing movement to watch the way judges act, and to open lines for complaints about their conduct, with people who are neither lawyers nor judges playing an increasing role.

While the number of formal complaints has been growing, there still are relatively few, in part because lawyers and the people they represent are wary of retaliation from the bench, Coyle reports in the ABA Journal.  She is a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Pacayune, and was a fellow in legal journalism at Yale University.

There was a 40 -percent increase in the number of complaints lodged against federal judges between 1990 and 1993, with a similar trend in the states.  At least 90 percent of the complaints ultimately are dismissed, as unfounded or due to the difficulty of differentiating between cases in which the losing side is griping and those in which there really has been injudicious conduct.

With caseloads increasing while staffs are not, there can be extra pressure on judges.  The stress is heightened by the fact that they are always on duty, their words recorded, conduct and even moods closely observed.

"The trappings of judgeship can add to the mix.  A few people think 'your honor' means them, rather than their office," Payani observed.

There is a reverse side to all this.  "There are judges who behave impeccably in the courtroom and issue dreadful decisions," said Lynn Hecht Schafran of the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in New York.

In another appraisal of courtroom conduct and confidence, an academic adviser to the American Enterprise Institute suggests that American judges ought to have more authority.  James Q. Qilson of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests the English model as an answer, saying judges there have retained control over their courtrooms while many U.S. Judges have lost it.

English judges select jurors, often question witnesses, and summarize and evaluate evidence, Wilson said.  "American judges typically let the lawyers choose the jurors and do all of the talking. 

He said American criminal trials should be simpler and less adversarial, not "lengthy, lawyer-dominated soap operas" in which the search for truth has been subordinated to the manipulation of procedures".

In contrast to the English system in which a prosecutor in one case can represent the defense in the next, high-profile American trials have become "mortal combat" between prosecutors and defense attorneys whose roles do not change.

"The rewards can be great," Wilson writes, "votes, money, prestige and book contracts."

Much of that was on display during and after the nine-month spectacle of the Simpson trial.  And it has at least raised the level of discussion and the exchange of ideas on the long-building problem of confidence in the courts.