Q&a: New Director Defines Goals for Judicial Council
| Jurisdiction | California,United States |
| Citation | Vol. 01 No. 2015 Pg. 01 |
| Pages | 01 |
| Publication year | 2015 |
Martin N. Hoshino joined the Judicial Council as its administrative director last fall Bar Journal Editor Laura Ernde recently spoke with him about his approach to the job and his plans.
Before you joined the Judicial Council you were a top administrator at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. I'm curious what prompted you to make the move to the Judicial Council.
It's a long story, but I'll give you an abbreviated version. I've always had an early interest in this area of government. I 'm one of those folks who came out of college with two different degrees in political science at two different levels and always thought about whether the path for me was to be an attorney. I ended up taking a public administrator's path. And I progressed through different parts of government. I spent about 10 to 11 years in various places inside the very large Department of Corrections. I had some time at the Board of Parole Hearings, for about four or five years, which is an administrative function that has a lot of similarities to what occurs here in the judicial branch. I had also worked with the judicial branch and courts in terms of mental health courts, drug courts. Proposition 36 passed, which was the first three-strikes reform, so I worked closely with the courts in eligibility, in moving those cases over to be heard. And then I worked at the Board of Parole Hearings, where I had a class action that was supervised in Marin County by Judge Verna Adams. Of course, in corrections there were 19 major class actions. I had a lot of interaction in that part of the system with the courts, albeit some of them federal and some of them state. It brought me closer and closer.
Then about a year and a half ago the governor tapped me as part of a work group that he and the chief justice put together called the Trial Court Funding Work Group. That was my experience of seeing the tip of the iceberg of court funding, unification. I got to see it in real time participating in that. The logic was that I was administering and managing a vast system, a very large budget with a lot of moving parts, and would have an appreciation of the size of a statewide operation, but then also the individuality that operates that and the different levels of autonomy and how you might balance a large central operation at the state level with the county and local government apparatus that is so prevalent here in California. That was a fascinating experience for me.
So when the [administrative director] opening...
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