What was going on when I was born?

Prominent lawyers, judges and scholars warn that the nation's system of justice is choking on its own complexity and costliness as swollen caseloads place ever-greater demands on it. Experts as diverse as Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Attorney General William French Smith, Griffin B. Bell, the Attorney General in the Carter Administration, and Derek Bok, the president of Harvard University and former dean of the Harvard Law School, argue that the country suffers from too many laws, too many lawsuits, too many legal entanglements and, at least in Mr. Bok's view, too many lawyers. While such complaints are not new, they are being voiced with increasing urgency by many pillars of the legal establishment as well as by outside critics. In his most recent of many complaints about the Supreme Court's swollen caseload, a May 17 speech to the American Law Institute, Chief Justice Burger declared that the nation was plagued ''with an almost irrational focus - virtually a mania - on litigation as a way to solve all problems.'' Mr. Bok, in his annual report to the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, said the United States had ''developed a legal system that is the most expensive in the world yet cannot manage to protect the rights of most of its citizens.''

The leading economic indicators rose 1.1 percent in April, their 10th consecutive monthly increase, the Commerce Department reported. The gain was seen as further evidence that recovery continues to gain momentum. Indeed, private and Government experts now believe the recovery will be stronger than the Administration had forecast. (Page D1.)

''The problem hasn't been monster storms, just a steady diet of regular ones.'' - Robert Dickson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. (D19:1.)

The Government's index of leading economic indicators rose 1.1 percent in April, the Commerce Department reported today. It was the 10th consecutive monthly increase and further evidence that the economic recovery continues to gain momentum. Nine of the eleven components of the index rose, led by an advance in the average workweek. The department also revised the increase for March to 2.2 percent, up from the 1.5 percent initially reported in April.

THE American passion for red, full-flavored meat is a distinctly halfhearted affair: though we are smitten with beef, we hardly give lamb a tumble by comparison. Yet by any reasonable standard, that shouldn't be the case. Lamb is just as red and twice as flavorful; on sale, it can be less expensive, and in the kitchen, there are dozens of dishes that can be made with it. On close scrutiny, in fact, our seemingly red-blooded predilection for nothing but hamburgers, steaks and prime ribs turns out to be frailty in disguise, rather like the fervor of those who profess a robust enthusiasm for the great outdoors, but who half the time find it too hot, too cold, too wet or just too much. Too much: ah, there's the rub - at least if you listen to the lambloathers among us. Stevedores and steeplejacks, tycoons of industry and titans of finance insist they can't stand the smell of it cooking. Otherwise competent heads of households have been known to whine when asked to carve a roasted leg. And in our entire history as a country, there has probably never been a church-supper planning group or a political dinner committee whose terror of lamb wasn't such that the idea of putting it on a menu was unthinkable.

The National Weather Service said yesterday that the current rainy spring, which has caused deaths, floods, mud slides and general coast-to-coast havoc may go down as one of the wettest on record for many parts of the country. The heavy precipitation has occurred in other parts of the world as well, particularly in South America. And a chief cause, meteorologists believe, may be El Nino, a fickle Pacific Ocean westto-east countercurrent that has been much stronger than normal in the past year. Mud slides and floods killed at least two people and caused six injuries Monday in Nevada and Utah, where 1,300 people were cut off as rivers of mud smothered cars and houses. On Monday violent storms hit Texas and were blamed for the deaths of six people. There were no immediate estimates of economic loss, but in past years similarly wet springs have caused billions of dollars of damage to property and crops.

President Reagan, assessing the results of the seven-nation summit conference that ended Monday night, predicted today that Soviet-American relations would improve because of the support he had received for his Administration's positions on arms control. In an interview with eight correspondents at Providence Hall, the 18th-century clapboard house he used as his personal headquarters, Mr. Reagan said the improvement ''may not be visible in the rhetoric in the immediate future, because there's an awful lot of rhetoric that is delivered for home consumption.'' Asked whether he expected better or worse relations with the Soviet Union, the President replied, ''I see better because I think all of us together have a more realistic view of them.'' The Path to Negotiations He said the conference showed that the best way of persuading the Russians to negotiate limits on medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe was to convince them there was broad-based support for the deployment of American missiles there this year.

When officials of the Grumman Corporation learned that the Navy was thinking of ordering a temporary halt in the production of F-14 Tomcat jet fighters and A-6 Intruder attack aircraft, they found some good in what looked at first like unadulterated bad news: The Navy plan carried a commitment to equip future F-14's with more powerful engines, something Grumman had long been advocating. Of course, the Tomcats and Intruders accounted for more than half of the company's $2.1 billion in revenue last year, and the Navy proposal, if carried out in full, would mean two or three tight years for the company, several thousand layoffs and possibly the breakup of its network of subcontractors. But company officials and military industry analysts on Wall Street are not convinced that the plan as outlined will become policy. Grumman maintains - and lobbyists are now vigorously arguing in Washington - that the Navy's figures are wrong, that a shutdown of the type proposed would end up costing more than just running the production lines at a constant rate.

Even though commodity futures trading volume is soaring, brokerage houses are finding that they are not benefiting as much as they would like from the increased activity. ''The futures business has gone into a stage where it is simply not contributing to the earnings of securities brokerage houses with commodity trading operations,'' said George D.F. Lamborn, president of ACLI International Commodity Services, an arm of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette. ''The 31 percent increase in volume in the first four months was not reflected in the earnings of the commodity departments,'' said Bruce L. Cleland, president of Rudolf Wolff Commodity Brokers, the United States arm of one of the oldest London metals trading houses. The views of Mr. Lamborn and Mr. Cleland are echoed by what other top brokerage house executives say in private. For the record, however, spokesmen for such leading brokerage firms as Merrill Lynch, Shearson@ /American Express, E.F. Hutton and Dean Witter were either unavailable or would not comment on the earnings contributions of their commodity departments. Those that would not comment said the information was competitive.

Three present and two former police officers in the 10th Precinct in Manhattan have been indicted by a special state grand jury investigating allegations of police corruption. The indictments of the officers, who were arrested yesterday, brought to 19 the number of present and former officers who have been indicted or have pleaded guilty to Federal or state criminal charges or have been suspended on departmental charges. The actions resulted from a Federal investigation of charges that operators of after-hours clubs made payoffs to some police officers, mainly from the 10th Precinct. One of the officers indicted by the state was indicted earlier on Federal charges.

The United States Supreme Court refused today to decide whether a black defendant in a robbery case was denied a fair trial by an all-white jury in Brooklyn after the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to remove all seven blacks from the group of prospective jurors. The man's conviction was upheld last December by New York State's highest court, the Court of Appeals. In a 4-to-3 decision, that court said it felt bound to apply a 1965 Supreme Court precedent that effectively foreclosed judicial review of the racially motivated use of peremptory jury challenges. The case was unusual in that the Brooklyn District Attorney, Elizabeth Holtzman, joined the defendant in urging the Supreme Court to take the case and to re-examine the 1965 precedent.

An article in the Sports section Sunday about Larry Holmes gave incorrect dates for ABC's telecasts of the two recent heavyweight title fights. The Holmes-Tim Witherspoon fight will be shown Saturday and the Michael Dokes-Mike Weaver fight on June 11.