'Journal' Covers Changes In Judiciary

We’re celebrating the Tennessee Bar Journal’s first 40 years all year! In each issue we will look at an area of life in the law to see how the TBJ covered it. This month we consider the relationship the magazine has had with the judiciary.

The judicial system is so integral to the work of lawyers — the Journal’s primary audience — that naturally over the years, judges and courts have been in the spotlight in this magazine’s pages. Many articles have been about judges: how they should be treated, paid, selected, spoken to. These pages have even revealed a serious disease called “Robitis” (reported in 1992 by R. Vann Owens, himself a chancellor in Hamilton County at the time). Owens wrote an article, “Clashes with judges can’t always be attributed to ‘Robitis,’” regarding a TBA convention program about problems between the bench and bar. “No specific cure was proffered,” he wrote, “but it was intimated that general awareness of the disease would help mitigate some of its harmful effects.”

In November 1970, TBA president Joe W. Henry, who would later serve on the Tennessee Supreme Court, wrote of the progress made when the TBA proposed to Gov. Buford Ellington “a cooperative system of judicial selection” where the Board of Governors would serve as a “Judicial Qualifications Committee to investigate and screen” candidates for judicial appointment and report back to the governor.

“This is a major milestone in the long struggle for court modernization in Tennessee,” Henry wrote. “For the first time in history, the organized Bar of this state will play a major role in judicial selection.”

Certainly 1988 was also a hot year for the topic of judicial selection as the Modified Missouri Plan, soon to be adopted as the Tennessee Plan, was discussed from different perspectives by presidents Jim Emison and Landis Turner in their president’s columns.

The cover of the May/June 1990 issue featured a story by Joe G. Riley, who was Circuit Court judge for Dyer and Lake counties. The article outlined ethical requirements for judicial candidates. “In this election year,” he wrote, “judicial hopefuls across the state should have Canon 7 of the Code of Judicial Conduct etched in their brains.”

That election year was perhaps a bit more diverse than previous judicial elections, since two years earlier the Marion Griffin Chapter of the Lawyers Association for Women had sponsored a seminar that was covered by the Journal (“Workshop teaches women how to run for judge: Gearing up for 1990,” March/April 1988, by cub reporter Suzanne Robertson). The seminar taught, “the nuts and bolts of what a judicial campaign involves” and drew nearly 60 women who committed to form a statewide network. This was the beginning of the statewide Tennessee Lawyers Association for Women.

In February 1999, Lewis L. Laska and Lewis D. Howell Jr. wrote a colorful history of Tennessee judges that included such information as when a group of “Tennessee lawyers got so angry with an overbearing judge that they threatened to throw him in the river.”

More recently, the Journal has carried messages from presidents about respect for the work of judges (“Judges work hard in and out of courtroom,” by Randy Noel, May 2000, and “Judges deserve to be paid fairly,” by John Tarpley, August 2003). Katie Edge ’s feature-length article, “Judicial independence/judicial accountability: A delicate balance” (May/June 1998), detailed that struggle, and outlined the work of the TBA’s then-relatively new Task Force of the Tennessee Judiciary. This year, current President Bill Haltom is championing the American legal system and the protection of the rule of law (“It’s time to stand up and deliver,” July 2005, “Confidence in jury system declining,” August 2005, and “Why juries are smarter than judges,” November 2005).

Haltom and many before him remind us, through the pages of this magazine, that the goals of lawyers and judges are intertwined.

—Suzanne Craig Robertson