When Janice Holder was deciding what to do with her life after college, she gave going to law school the same chance as being a teacher, a paralegal or a Pan Am flight attendant. She applied for all of these — and was accepted by every one of them.

“I decided I would go to law school to see if I liked it,” she says now from her office in the Supreme Court building in Nashville, weeks before her retirement as a Supreme Court justice. “My attitude was that I would go to law school the first year, and if I liked it I’d stay; if not, I’d do something else.”

She stayed past the first year and graduated from Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh, 30 minutes down the road from Robinson Township, Pennsylvania, where she had grown up. Her journey would soon lead to the warmer climes of Tennessee but not before she clerked for Chief Judge Herbert P. Sorg of the U.S. District Court, Western District of Pennsylvania, and then practiced law for two years in Pittsburgh. The clerkship was life-changing for Holder; she soon knew without a doubt that at some point she wanted to become a judge.

“Judge Sorg was a judge’s judge, superb on the bench,” she says. “He was a federal district court judge who thought that his highest calling was as a trial judge. He turned down offers to be on the Third Circuit.”

She learned a lot from Judge Sorg. “His role was to teach us what it was like to practice law. Both clerks were required to be in court at all times,” she recalls. “One of the clerks sat at a table researching the law while listening to the trial. The other clerk sat just below the judge’s bench taking notes.” Holder says that during this time she had a front-row seat to trials involving some of the finest lawyers, including F. Lee Bailey, who tried his case without notes.

“It was an interesting time to watch trial after trial and absorb it all,” she says. “It was the best education I could have had.”

After clerking for Judge Sorg, she practiced law in Pennsylvania for two years and then headed south with her then-husband, who had secured a job at a law firm in Memphis. After two rounds of frostbite in Pittsburgh, she says weather was the compelling factor for the move.

“I couldn’t get a job in Memphis,” she says. She applied to many law firms but says she felt that there was a reluctance to hire someone whose spouse was working in another law firm. Finally, in late 1979, a friend helped her get an interview. When one of the partners interviewing her asked if she planned to “have a family,” Holder responded, “I’m happy to answer that, but you may have just violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.”

“My attitude wasn’t entirely great,” she admits now with a smile as she recalls answering the phone later that day and receiving “a job offer from a law firm that probably thought I was going to sue them.”

That was also at a time, she explains, when women did not go out to lunch with male lawyers. “I ate with the administrative assistants,” she says. One day she was sitting with them in the conference room and one of the senior male lawyers came in and said something about the “damn Arabs.” Holder looked up and said, “You realize part of my family background is Syrian, right?” There was dead silence. After the lawyer left she asked what was wrong with what she had said. It seems that the senior lawyer had told everyone he had hired Holder because she was Jewish.

“So that’s how I got my first job in Tennessee,” she says. She practiced law until 1990 when she successfully ran for an open seat on the Circuit Court and became a judge in Division II of the Circuit Court of Tennessee for the 30th Judicial District at Memphis.

The New ‘Tennessee Plan’

In 1994 there was an opening on the Tennessee Supreme Court that was to be filled using the newly enacted Tennessee Plan, which provided that the governor would fill all appellate court vacancies by choosing from a panel of three nominees submitted by the Judicial Selection Commission.

Holder says she thought it “would be interesting to see what it was like to go through the process.” So she applied. She was not appointed to the seat; instead Penny White was chosen and became the second woman to serve on the state’s highest court.

“An unexpected vacancy occurred in ’96 when Justice White was defeated,” Holder says. Holder applied again. Because a Special Supreme Court had opined post-election that only candidates from East Tennessee could apply for the vacancy, Holder filed a lawsuit challenging that portion of the court’s opinion. She won the lawsuit and was permitted to be considered by the Judicial Selection Commission. She was appointed by Gov. Don Sundquist and in December of that year she became the third woman to serve on the court, which she did alongside four men.

In 1998, Justice Adolpho A. Birch was successful in his retention election, in which he had some opposition, and the remaining four justices were retained without much controversy. In 2006, without campaigning or raising money, all of the justices subject to retention election were re-elected.

“We had become accustomed to pretty quiet retention elections,” she points out. “This [year’s election] is an aberration that I hope will not be repeated.”

A Champion for Access to Justice

Holder has been involved in many decisions while on the court but counts two contributions as her most important: the increased emphasis on access to justice and the Supreme Court’s Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program (TLAP).

“Our role in guiding the judicial branch is as important as the cases we are deciding,” she says of these areas she has helped shape and empower. While under her leadership as chief justice in 2008, the court unveiled its Access to Justice Initiative, which was the court’s first priority under its strategic plan. The court hired an access to justice coordinator, created a new web site dedicated to access to justice, began an educational campaign by conducting a series of five public meetings in libraries, and created a statewide Access to Justice Commission under the auspices of the court.

“I always did pro bono,” she says, having become involved when she first moved to Memphis through Linda Warren Seely, who is director of Pro Bono Projects at Memphis Area Legal Services. “I did a lot of pro bono until I became a trial court judge. As a judge, pro bono service becomes more difficult, or at least we think so. But there are things judges can do.

“The court’s discussion about access to justice in ’07 and ’08 made me think about my old access-to-justice background. During our strategic planning, we all recognized that access to justice needed to be the court’s first priority. We started working to that end.”

Recently, Holder was presented the 2014 William M. Leech Jr. Public Service Award at the Tennessee Bar Association’s annual meeting in Gatlinburg. Also, the Tennessee Alliance of Legal Services has named an award after her, calling her “a passionate leader in Tennessee’s Access to Justice initiative, a courageous champion of the rights of the historically marginalized, and a dedicated servant to the people of this state.”

“The TALS award is close to my heart,” she says.

“The more you do pro bono the more you became addicted to it,” she says. “We need to continue leading access to justice efforts — and to the extent that I can continue to contribute, I’m going to do so.”

She is concerned, however, about adequate funding of the Legal Services Corporation. “It would be hard to continue access-to-justice efforts if our LSC-funded organizations aren’t able to help us. They provide critical support to the access-to-justice efforts of attorneys across the state. So it is vitally important that Congress provide sufficient funds for the Legal Services Corporation. We need our LSC-funded organizations to be able to adequately perform their functions. They are the foundation on which the efforts of the private bar are based.”

That Holder will continue working in this area should be a relief to the access-to-justice community. She intends to talk it up with lawyers and judges. When she talks to judges’ groups, she says she emphasizes one thing to them: “Pro bono is not just one-on-one representation, which is beyond the scope of judicial activity. Pro bono work is also speaking about pro bono or advancing the administration of justice; it encompasses far more than what we think of as pro bono.”

She says she realized this the first year of pro-bono reporting when she put zero hours down because she was thinking only of one-on-one representation.

“When I went back and read Tennessee Supreme Court Rule 8, section 6.1, I realized that the definition of pro bono is very broad. Every time I provide continuing legal education, I’m doing pro bono. Anytime I do something to improve the administration of justice, I can count that. The message I want to get out to judges is that we are not prohibited from providing pro-bono service. We are limited in what we can do, but Supreme Court Rule 10, section 3.7 provides judges with guidelines. I encourage judges to read the applicable rules and become involved. We as a court should be proud of our commitment to access-to-justice issues,” she says.

Helping Lawyers Get Help

The other major accomplishment for which Holder wants to be remembered is the Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program (TLAP). She has been involved in the effort to provide help to lawyers, judges and law students with addiction issues since 1987. That’s when she helped found Lawyers Helping Lawyers in Memphis, in large part because of her law partner’s suicide.

“We all knew there was something wrong, but we didn’t know what to do about it,” she said in a 2011 interview with the Tennessee Bar Journal about TLAP. “There wasn’t anybody to call. He was seeing a mental health professional, but it wasn’t enough. You don’t know what you are seeing, but you know something is wrong.”

The Memphis program was one of the programs that led to the nationally respected program created by the Tennessee Supreme Court, TLAP.

Holder was the 2013 recipient of the TBA’s Frank F. Drowota III Outstanding Judicial Service Award for her work with the Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program and with Access to Justice issues.

TLAP was created by Supreme Court Rule 33 and is funded by a fee paid by all lawyers licensed in Tennessee. It is a free, anonymous and confidential service for impaired lawyers and judges. The program is the “premiere lawyer- and judge-assistance program in the country,” Holder says. In November, TLAP will host the American Bar Association’s Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs’ annual meeting in Nashville, which she says reflects the stature of the program.

Qualified and Dedicated People

She has enjoyed the work on the Supreme Court — that much is obvious. She says it is challenging, rewarding, and collaborative.

“We don’t have one-judge opinions. Everyone is involved in whatever is written,” she says. “What may look very clean and clear when it’s published can take months of work to get it to the point where everyone’s happy with it and willing to let it be an opinion of the court. This work is some of the most gratifying because it’s a group effort, taking into consideration everyone’s views. Each opinion makes a strong attempt to incorporate all views as best we can.”

The parts of her job she has loved are the intellectual challenges and “the knowledge that your collective opinion will be the final word on something. It’s important to get it right and important to get it right for the right reason,” she says. “I have been fortunate to have colleagues who really care about what they do and how they do it. I don’t know if Tennessee knows how fortunate it is to have a system that produces appellate judges and justices who are so well-qualified and dedicated.”

She served on the court as the only woman for many years until Justice Connie Clark was appointed in 2005 and then three years later, Sharon Lee. This was an historic time during which Tennessee’s first majority female court was created.

“When Justice Clark came on board, it was a total shift in terms of conversation,” Holder says. “When Justice Lee came on board, it was interesting to see how a majority female court works.” Even the everyday conversation was different, Holder says, like how they might get to lunch on a given day. Who would ride with whom?

“On my first court, I don’t know that people ever carpooled,” she laughs, admitting that it might be as much a generational change as anything. But, she says, conversations definitely had a different tone.

Holder was the third woman on the state Supreme Court but the first to serve as chief justice, which she was from 2008 through 2010.

“I had never been a first,” she says. “That was my first first. By the time I became chief justice, I had never been the first woman to do anything.” She had “been third or eighth where you could always watch who came before you” but had not felt that pressure that accompanies being the first one.

“I did feel the weight of that,” she admits. “I’m not saying I wish I had done it differently, but [I didn’t realize] that being the first of something would carry with it pressure to perform. Not for myself, but to make sure that I represented the court in a dignified manner and the entire court could be proud. I didn’t want them to be upset because I said or did something inappropriate.”

Technology Has Changed the Court

In her 18 years on the court, there has been an explosion in available technology, and the Supreme Court is no different. Holder credits these upgrades with the biggest change to the court’s process during her tenure.

When she was first appointed to the court, she says, she went to her office and found the corner of it filled with boxes. She didn’t know what they were but soon learned they were filled with court records supporting Rule 11 applications the court would soon be discussing. She was told they were there in case she wanted to look at the records.

“We had only three days to prepare; there was no way I could look in all of the boxes,” she says. “Then I had to figure out how to ship the boxes back! This is how we operated for years.”

Now, however, technology allows them to scan a record as well as the briefs and everything can be available for all members of the court at the same time. The court has not yet implemented e-filing, but it is on the horizon and will make the technology work for lawyers as well as the judges who decide cases in the appellate system. “These changes have streamlined procedures and have made us more efficient in deciding cases,” she says, “and it brings a court together that is spread out across the state.”

The New Passion of Law Students

Holder enjoys being part of law students’ lives and she has begun hosting an Alternative Spring Break reception at her condominium in Memphis.

“It just tickles me to watch them get involved in access-to-justice issues while they are in law school,” she says. “They are passionately involved. If they come out of law school being passionately involved, it gives us so much to hope for as they transition into the practice of law.”

She describes how when she was in law school, helping others like that was not part of the conversation or practice.

“You got to that at a later stage in your career when you became aware of the need,” she says. “Now it’s either part of their requirements or an aspirational goal. I hope new law school graduates will continue their pro-bono service and not allow the pressures of practice to intervene. I hope they realize that one way of dealing with those pressures is to do something that benefits other people.”

Finding Balance

Another way of dealing with pressures, Holder has found, is by finding balance. Karate, which she practices every day, has helped her do this. In fact, until she became chief justice she was teaching karate six days a week as well as continuing her own classes. It helps her with concentration, focus and proper breathing, she says.

“Commitment to a martial art helps everything in my life. I recommend martial arts to everyone. It is what grounds me. The key to everything is proper breathing, which teaches you how to focus on detail, pay attention and concentrate. If you breathe through whatever it is you’re doing, it’s going to center you.”

This justice is always busy, and judging from her list of interests, that is not going to change in retirement.

“I am trying to take it slowly and will look at all of my options to build a schedule that pleases me and that will be of benefit to the legal community,” she says. She wants to stay involved with access-to-justice issues, yes, but she also has a scuba diving trip planned in November, will continue with karate — and she loves boating in her vintage ski boat (a 1977 Aristocraft Nineteen), driving her 1964 Corvair, traveling, golfing and horseback riding. Two of her newer activities are skeet shooting and welding.

Yes, welding. Her father was a rigger and welder, and she says she always wanted to learn to weld but didn’t do it while he was alive. She has since taken a course at the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Memphis where she was the only non-artist. “I was a little bit of a fish out of water but it was great fun,” she says. She even made a piece of artwork out of some architectural elements from the 1880s that were part of her downtown building.

The Court Is in Good Hands

Holder’s last day on the Supreme Court was Aug. 31, but she has committed to serving on a special panel of the Supreme Court, as needed. Holly Kirby has been chosen to fill her seat on the court, and with Jeff Bivins in retired Justice Bill Koch’s seat, the balance and makeup of the court has already changed.

“As people are replaced, even one person, it makes a big difference in the court dynamic,” Holder says. “Now we have two new people. It’s hard to know how that will change the court. You just have to sit, wait and watch.

“I’m confident the court is in good hands,” she says. “I feel good about its direction.”
 

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SUZANNE CRAIG ROBERTSON is editor of the Tennessee Bar Journal.