Judges' Corner: Reflections on Colorado's State Appellate Courts, 0716 COBJ, Vol. 45 No. 7 Pg. 81
| Author | Richard Gabriel, J. |
Richard Gabriel, J.
Judges’ Corner is published quarterly to provide information Colorado judges would like to disseminate to attorneys. If you would like to suggest topics or write an article for this Department, please send an email to Coordinating Editor Stephanie Dunn, Colorado Court of Appeals Judge, at stephanie. dunn@judicial.state.co.us.
As a result of my appointment to the Colorado Supreme Court, I became a member of a club that for unknown reasons is surprisingly exclusive: I became only the second Colorado Court of Appeals judge to be appointed to the Colorado Supreme Court, and the first since Justice Howard Kirschbaum was appointed in 1983. Since my appointment, I have been asked many times to compare my experiences on the two courts. This article offers a brief response.
Substantial Similarities
Upon my appointment, I recognized almost immediately that the similarities between the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals far outweigh any differences. Indeed, the substantial commonality of the work and the nature of these two institutions have made for a very smooth transition as I have settled into my new role.
The central part of the job on both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals is to write appellate opinions, and the bulk of the Supreme Court’s caseload comes to the Court on certiorari from the Court of Appeals. Hence, in my current job, I am writing opinions on legal issues with which, thanks to my work on the Court of Appeals, I have a fair amount of experience. Moreover, I have not had to start from scratch in learning how to write an appellate opinion. Rather, I have been able to use the lessons that I learned from my Court of Appeals colleagues, including the wisdom of writing clearly, concisely, and narrowly, and the importance of remembering that our role as jurists is to apply the law fairly and impartially and to decide only those issues that the parties have properly presented and that the court truly needs to decide.
This is not to say that no distinctions exist between the writing of appellate opinions and the types of cases that arise in the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. For example, the Supreme Court has exclusive jurisdiction to hear certain types of cases, including direct appeals from water courts and ballot title matters. Nonetheless, on the whole, the differences in the writing of appellate opinions and the types of cases that the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals hear are differences more of degree than kind.
A second area of substantial similarity between the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals is the way in which the justices and judges treat one...
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