Views from the Bench
| Publication year | 2015 |
| Pages | 18 |
| Citation | Vol. 28 No. 6 Pg. 18 |
November, 2015
From the Trial Bench to the Appellate Bench
Kate A. Toomey, Judge.
A treasured colleague once likened the difference between being a trial court judge and an appellate court judge to the difference between attending an exciting event and merely reading about it. There is some truth to this, and I suspect that a strong preference for one over the other reveals a great deal. As for me, I am deeply grateful to have had both opportunities, first as a District Court judge for a little less than eight years, and now as a Court of Appeals judge for a little over a year. Here, I offer some observations about my experiences in each position, with special emphasis on the things that are perhaps not so obvious.
In some respects, although the daily routines are very different, shifting from one assignment to the other presented fewer difficulties than one might expect. Having a trial court docket crammed mostly with civil cases, I had gained at least some experience in many more substantive areas of the law than I had encountered as a litigator. Judges are among the last of the legal generalists, so although I had no experience in family law before taking the bench, it suddenly became an important part of my job to make decisions in those types of cases: our District Courts handled over 20,000 domestic cases last year. Here at the Court of Appeals, domestic cases constitute 7% of the filings, and so although the numbers are not so staggering as in District Court, they nevertheless continue to be a significant part of the work I do now. There are many other examples, but my point is that I had learned a lot of substantive family law before I began doing appellate work, and this existing base of knowledge allowed me to address those cases with a greater wealth of knowledge.
At the same time, I had little idea how a modern appellate court operates: how cases are assigned, calendared, managed, and tracked; how decisions are circulated, voted on, checked, double checked, then checked again before publication; how staff attorneys assist the business of the court; how case flow is measured and monitored; how statistics are generated and what they mean. Of course I had come to understand the inner workings of the District Court, but this was almost useless when I switched jobs. When it comes to moving an appellate case from briefing to decision, the process is...
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