Justice Stanley Feldman: an extraordinary judicial career.

• Author: Bender, Paul
• Position: Arizona Supreme Court - Testimonial

On December 31, 2002, Stanley G. Feldman retired as a Justice of the Arizona Supreme Court after twenty-one years of service on that court. For five of those years, he served as Chief Justice. Justice Feldman's retirement was not entirely voluntary. Although federal judges have life tenure, Arizona's Constitution provides that its state's judges must retire upon "attaining the age of seventy years." (1) Feldman reached that milestone in March of 2003.

Justice Feldman's tenure on the Arizona Supreme Court was one of extraordinary accomplishment. In the midst of a career in Tucson as a brilliant and successful lawyer, Feldman was named to the supreme court by Governor Bruce Babbitt in 1982--the second Arizona Supreme Court Justice to be appointed under Arizona's then-new merit-selection system. In the ensuing two decades, Justice Feldman was the court's most influential member, writing about 400 majority opinions and displaying an exceptional ability to forge consensus among his colleagues. His thoughtful and powerful views about the role of courts in a democracy, about the special character of the Arizona Constitution, and about the need for court decisions to reflect reality rather than abstractions and formalisms, have largely (although not always) been accepted by the court's majority. Over the past twenty years, Justice Feldman led the Arizona Supreme Court to recognition as perhaps the most distinguished state supreme court in the country.

Feldman's progressive jurisprudence had important and beneficial effects for all Arizonans. Consider, for example, Justice Feldman's approach to the role of the common law--that judge-made set of basic legal principles that has been evolved by English and American courts over the past several hundred years. In one of its first enactments after statehood, the Arizona Legislature declared that the common law "is adopted and shall be the rule of decision in all courts of this state." (2) Some argued that the effect of this statute was to freeze the content of the common law in Arizona as it stood in 1912, thus preventing Arizona's judges from continuing to develop common-law principles to deal with changing conditions and evolving legal concepts. Justice Feldman successfully championed the much more useful and sensible view that Arizona's courts remain free to develop common-law principles as fairness and justice require. (3)

In one of his best-known opinions, announcing the court's 1985 decision in...