May 2006 #2. The Changing Role Of Hawai'i's Intermediate Appellate Court.

• Author: by EDMUND M.Y. LEONG

Hawaii Bar Journal

2006.

May 2006 #2.

The Changing Role Of Hawai'i's Intermediate Appellate Court

Hawaii State Bar JournalMay 2006The Changing Role Of Hawai'i's Intermediate Appellate Courtby EDMUND M.Y. LEONGIn its 2004 regular session, the Hawai'i Legislature passed Act 202, which will transfer initial jurisdiction for hearing appeals from the Hawai'i Supreme Court ("HSC") to the Intermediate Court of Appeals ("ICA"), effective as of July 1, 2006.1 This reform represents an important continuation, after a hiatus of two-and-a-half decades, towards a modern and mainstream state appellate system that began with the original establishment of the ICA in 1980 as a result of the 1978 Constitutional Convention. It significantly enhances the ICA's role in the state appellate system.

Proposals for court reform unavoidably generate political conflict because different institutional arrangements alter the distribution of advantages and disadvantages among the competing individuals and groups.2 In Hawai'i, the primary interest groups advancing competing positions on the development of an appellate system have been the state judiciary and local legal community. This article sets the stage by outlining the basic nature of appellate system reform in America. It then focuses on appellate system reform in Hawaii's judiciary.

THE AMERICAN ROLE OF INTERMEDIATE APPELLATE COURTS

American judiciaries have made changes to confront ever-rising appellate caseloads in similar and predictable ways.3 Typically, they have reorganized appellate court structure and jurisdiction to relieve the work pressure. This reorganization has generally involved the establishment of an intermediate appellate court along with grants of power that provided the supreme court greater docket control by authorizing discretionary review of certain types of cases. With the jurisdictional changes that normally accompanied the establishment of an intermediate appellate court, each appellate court performed a different function. The intermediate court was primarily responsible for resolving the larger number of appeals presenting routine or clear-cut issues and requiring simple error correction. The supreme court was thereby freed to select the disputes it resolved and to concentrate on the smaller number of cases that raised more serious policy questions. From a political perspective, the judiciary's organizational structure had a significant impact on the potential of state supreme courts to make policy. Concomitant with this functional change, the justices on the court of last resort came to view themselves more as policy-makers and less as conflict resolvers.

Judicial resources must be expanded from time to time to effectively handle rising caseloads, but expansion of judicial capacity at the appellate level requires complex structural changes. When trial court dockets grow to the point where existing judicial capacity is inadequate, legislation can be enacted to either create additional courts or add new judges to courts at the trial level. But when the appellate docket has permanently grown beyond the processing capability of the judiciary's highest court, the creation of an additional supreme court or expansion of the supreme court's membership with additional justices are not typically proposed. Structural reform of a supreme court, for this or any other purpose, is more exceptional than common. From an organizational perspective, state and federal judiciaries establish intermediate appellate courts, functioning independently from the supreme court, that possess the flexibility to absorb periodic expansion of judicial resources to deal with an ever-growing appellate caseload.4 To benefit from this flexibility and make effective use of judicial resources, the intermediate court becomes the appellate entry point and is authorized to form working groups of relatively small-sized panels to hear appeals. The intermediate court judges expeditiously deal with the bulk of appeals, basically the more routine error-correction cases, without further review by the supreme court. The supreme court as the court of last resort is not well-suited to serve as the workhorse of the appellate system.

THE INTERMEDIATE APPELLATE COURT'S ROLE IN HAWAI'I

Debate arose among the delegates to the original Hawai'i Constitutional Convention over expansion of the supreme court's traditional three-member size when the Judiciary Article was being drafted in 1950. The dominant and prevailing view was that the court would be more active under statehood than it had been during the monarchical and territorial periods and there would be superior decisions with five rather than three different viewpoints on matters before the court. Although the intermediate appellate court concept was well-established by the mid-twentieth...