From Doug Berman via the hardest working man in the blawgosphere, Howard Bashman, comes this quote from Florida’s new Chief Justice, Peggy Quince, during her swearing in ceremony:

Chief Justice Peggy Quince, the first black woman to head any branch of Florida government, used her swearing in ceremony to call for a new commission to fight a widespread perception of unequal treatment in the courts. “No one should come out of this court system feeling that they were treated unfairly,” Quince said. “You may lose, but you should not feel that you were treated unfairly.”

Quince vowed to continue a push by her predecessor to reform a criminal-justice system that spends $250 million a year housing defendants too mentally ill to stand trial. “Our jails and prisons cannot continue to be the psychiatric hospitals that no longer exist,” she said.

Aside from the fact that this is from Florida, not usually considered a state on the cutting edge of anything aside from hanging chads, this is perhaps the most profound understanding one could hope for from a Chief Justice.  Courts must, be definition, have winners and losers, but the greatest failing of our collective court system is that litigants leave feeling that they were treated unfairly. 

Justice Quince is a 60 year old former prosecutor and appellate judge.  It’s hard to know whether her sense of purpose comes from her earlier or later experience, but the experience in the well, as opposed to the sanitary chambers of an appeals court, would seem to have the greatest impact on her appreciation of the fact that people feel that the system is arrogant, callous and stacked against them. 

Trial judges, some of whom come into the job with the hope of providing both the atmosphere as well as the reality of fairness, tend to grow hard shells around themselves so that they can make their numbers in a system that would do better moving cattle than people.  Becoming inured to human misery, both caused externally and internally, is one of the most destructive forces to the law.  Perhaps Justice Quince, never having sat as a trial level judge, has managed to achieve her position without growing that hard shell to protect herself from the destruction caused by the system.

But she is not the first Chief Judge to take office with a focus on something other than herself, her patron or the greater glory of the law.  Judy Kaye tried to do so as well in New York, but her vision was far more narrow than Justice Quince, and her accomplishments never exceeded her vision.

Chief Justice Quince’s statement gets to the heart of the matter.  To say that the court system should be, in fact, fair is too obvious.  But to recognize that the perception of unfair treatment by litigants is at the heart of disrespect for the courts, the judges and ultimately the law, is both simple and profound. 

I wish Chief Justice Quince the best of luck in accomplishing her goal.  And I’m amazed that Gov. Charlie Crist, who didn’t bother to show up for the swearing in ceremony, would have a Chief Justice with such vision, empathy and understanding.