April 2015

• Author: Robert E. Emery,Andrew I. Schepard
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12141
• Published date: 01 April 2015
• Date: 01 April 2015

EDITORIAL NOTES

APRIL 2015

The articles in this issue address cutting-edge issues in family law and courts.

SPECIAL FEATURE:THE MODERN FAMILY COURT JUDGE

FCR readers and the AFCC community know how important a family court judge is and how deep

an effect he or she can have on the lives of parents and children. Family court places unique demands

on the individuals who preside over it. In addition to knowing and applying increasingly complex law

to the case before them, family court judges must also preside over a future-oriented family reorga-

nization. They must make educated but agonizingly uncertain guesses about what the future holds for

children and parents and what can be done to facilitate a better one.

Family court judges must be able to protect safety, refer families to dispute resolution and helpful

resources in their communities, ensure compliance with service plans, hold social service agencies

accountable, and preserve hope and stability to the extent possible in troubled families. They must be

able to treat self-represented litigants fairly and courteously.And they must accomplish all of this in

an atmosphere dominated by emotional trauma and overcrowding due to reduced resources.

We all agree that excellent judges dedicated to their work should preside over the family court. But

how do we define and recognize excellence in family court judging? And how do we nurture its

development in new judges and maintain it during the course of a long career on the bench?

We have not generally asked these questions by looking to the process of selecting and training

family court judges in different states. We have complained that individual judges are not knowledge-

able about the cases that come before them—they are, for example, too influenced or not influenced

enough by forensic evaluations in parenting disputes.We tend to look at the quality of the family court

bench as accidental, at the mercy of forces of selection and training beyond our control.

Other institutions such as businesses and universities and health care delivery systems sometimes

seem to rely on something like chance to identify and train personnel for highly demanding jobs.

Many have complained, for example, that university professors are not trained to be excellent teachers

and that quality of teaching is not sufficiently factored into promotion and tenure decisions. The

teaching excellence of any particular professor is thus the result of happenstance.

Other institutions are not, however, content to rely on chance to identify and train excellent people

to staff the most important positions in their organizations. Rather, they ask a more complex set of

questions: what policies and practices can be put in place to help identify, train, and develop excellent

professionals and employees? Many companies, for example, have recruitment and training programs

to identify and develop senior personnel over a long period of time.1

Some countries identify and train judges in that manner. In Germany, for example, judges follow

a distinct career path. At the end of their legal education at university, all law students must pass a state

examination before they can continue on to an apprenticeship that provides them with broad training

in the legal profession over two years. They then must pass a second state examination that qualifies

them to practice law. At that point, the individual can choose either to be a lawyer or to enter the

judiciary. Judicial candidates start working at courts immediately, however, they are subjected to a

probationary period of up to five years before being appointed as judges for life.2

There are limits to the analogy between recruiting and training programs for companies, the way

judges are selected and trained elsewhere, and the recruitment and training of judges in the United

FAMILY COURT REVIEW,Vol. 53 No. 2, April 2015 199–202

© 2015 Association of Familyand Conciliation Cour ts