Views from the Bench
| Publication year | 1996 |
| Pages | 52 |
| Citation | Vol. 9 No. 6 Pg. 52 |
June, 1996
Some Resolutions of a New Judge
Robert K. Hilder, Judge.
I write this article reluctantly. One of my former partners warned me last year that if I had the effrontery to write a "view from the bench, " before I could reasonably claim to develop a legitimate view, any remaining respect for me would evaporate. Nine months of judicial service will probably fail to satisfy him, but perhaps it is not too soon to make some commitments to the bar, the public, my colleagues on the bench, and perhaps most important, myself, about how I plan to conduct myself as a judge.
My first nine months have been spent primarily as a circuit court judge with an overwhelmingly criminal calendar. In that time I have probably handled eight to ten thousand matters in court - enough to remind me that the business of law is people. As Robert T. Noonan, Jr. stated: "No person itself, the law lives in persons."[1] Many of these people are in a courtroom for the first time. Their view of the law, and of courts, if any, is shaped by television, movies, and the media. They want "justice, " but they are not at all sure the courts are designed to dispense justice, at least not to them. They are, for the most part, the less affluent, the less educated, the less influential, and they are conscious of their condition.
These people, in their hearts, might agree with Thucydides: "You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question for equals in power; the strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must." I believe and am pledged to the notion that this is not the reality in our Utah courts, but the cynicism, or at least skepticism, about equality under the law prevails. Many believe that equality under the law goes only as far as Anatole France suggested: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges."
Clarence Darrow is supposed to have said that: "in reality there is no such thing as justice either in or out of court. In fact, the word cannot be defined." Conceding the difficulty of definition, and even conceding that many decisions a judge is bound to make fall short of anyone's ideal definition of justice (e.g. what would happen in Utopia so often invoked by my contracts' professor, Dean Walter Oberer), I resolve to advance the cause of justice as far as it is in my power to do so. I will approach the matter, I hope, more like Judge Learned Hand, who rather than defining the word, made the following practical observation:
Justice does not depend upon legal dialectics so much as upon the atmosphere of the courtroom, and that in the end depends primarily on the judge.
Brown v. Walter, 62 F.2d 798, 800 (2nd Cir. 1933).
The following resolutions...
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