God, I love it when a federal judge goes off-script.

Most events in federal court are terribly dull, the carefully scripted culmination of legal briefs fired back and forth among various parties for years. But once in a great while, a judge goes a little nuts—as happened last week with the new hero of compliance officers everywhere, District Court Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle.

Huvelle was supposed to preside over a routine plea hearing in Washington last week, where Innospec Inc. would admit to several violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act stemming from bribes it paid while participating in the U.N. Oil for Food program in Iraq in the early 2000s. Innospec was already getting a somewhat raw deal, facing criminal charges and a $40.2 million fine for an offense the company voluntarily disclosed. As part of that settlement, it also agreed to hire a compliance monitor. Yes, that’s about as appealing as taking your guidance counselor to the senior prom, but that’s what the Justice Department wanted and what Innospec agreed to do.

Then Huvelle spoke up.

“It’s an outrage, that people get $50 million to be a monitor,” she said according to an account from MainJustice.com, which, hallelujah, had a reporter in the courtroom to capture her words. “I’m not comfortable, frankly, signing off on something that becomes a vehicle for someone to make lots of money … It’s a boondoggle for some of these people. If I was in private practice, I would love to be a monitor.”

But wait, it gets better! The assistant U.S. attorney on the case, at a loss for words, called for backup from Mark Mendelsohn, deputy chief of the Fraud Section over at Justice, who happened to be sitting in the spectator gallery. Mendelsohn parried with Huvelle for a while, arguing the importance of monitors and insisting that nobody in the Fraud Section would ever approve a monitor’s contract worth $50 million. (That infamous $52 million contract awarded several years ago to former attorney general John Ashcroft, to be a monitor for Zimmer Inc., came from the U.S. attorney’s office in New Jersey.) Huvelle eventually accepted the Innospec plea, but not before insisting that she be notified who the monitor would be.

Corporate compliance officers, meanwhile, are erecting statues in Huvelle's honor across the country. CCOs have long complained that they don't know how to work with monitors or how to set a reasonable scope of the monitor's duties, much less dispute findings they believe to be wrong. The Government Accountability Office said as much in November, when it published a report urging the Justice Department to give more guidance to companies with monitors about on how the agency may be able to help resolve questions they might have. Congress is also mulling legislation to bring more clarity to this murky, and expensive, point of confusion.

In fairness to Mendelsohn, the GAO report noted that his Fraud Section does indeed publish helpful guidance about monitors; the U.S. attorney offices are the primary troublemakers in the GAO's eyes. So in that respect, Mendelsohn was correct when he told Huvelle that the Fraud Section has never been in the habit of awarding $50 million contracts for compliance monitors.

But monitors are still expensive, and they are still poorly understood—and in that respect, Huvelle was correct, too.

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