Episode 108: Anne M. Burke
Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice (Retired)
00:47:47
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Show Notes
Former Illinois Supreme Court Chief Justice Anne M. Burke sits down with M.C. Sungaila for a wide-ranging discussion on her path to the bench, her role as a founder of the Special Olympics, and the importance of teaching critical thinking and civics education to the future of the judicial system. She also shares tips on brief writing and presenting a powerful oral argument, and why cursive writing is a practical skill every lawyer should possess.
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Relevant episode links:
Illinois Supreme Court, History on Trial
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About Anne M. Burke:
Anne M. Burke
Chief Justice Anne M. Burke has been a member of the Illinois Supreme Court, representing the First Judicial District, since her appointment on July 6, 2006. She was then elected to the seat in 2008, and was retained in November 2018. In September 2019, she was selected by her colleagues to serve as Chief Justice. Her three-year term as Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court commenced on October 26, 2019. Before becoming a member of the Illinois Supreme Court, Justice Burke served on the First District Appellate Court from 1995 to 2006.
In 1987, Justice Burke became the first woman appointed to the Illinois Court of Claims, a position she held from 1987 until 1994. In 1994, Justice Burke was appointed Special Counsel for Child Welfare Services by Governor Jim Edgar and was made a member of his Legislative Committee on Juvenile Justice, where she provided in-depth leadership in reshaping and improving the Illinois juvenile justice system. Justice Burke obtained her Juris Doctorate from Chicago-Kent School of Law in 1983.
Prior to her legal career, Justice Burke was a physical education teacher with the Chicago Park District, where she worked with children with learning differences. Having recognized the positive impact that sports competition had on her students, she championed the idea of a city-wide competition. This ultimately led to the creation of the Chicago Special Olympics in 1968, and grew to become the International Special Olympics, reaching tens of millions in 192 nations across the globe. She later served as a Director of the International Special Olympics and remains involved with Chicago Special Olympics to this day. From 2002 to 2004, Justice Burke also served as Interim Chair of the National Review Board of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, directing its investigation into the causes and effects of clerical sexual abuse and helping to establish guidelines and policies for effectively responding to this scandal. Justice Burke is married, has five children, and nine grandchildren.
Transcript
I am thrilled to have join the show Chief Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court, Anne Burke. Welcome, Justice.
Thank you very much. I'm very excited about this discussion.
Thank you so much for joining. You have an interesting background in not initially going into the law from the very beginning. You bring a varied and eclectic background to the bench and the practice of law. I hope that will be inspiring to those who didn't come out of high school, knowing that's what they wanted to do. I want to start with that, though. We will start with the law question as to how you decided to study law and become a lawyer. Maybe that will go into the backstory before that, too, when you discuss that.
It will go into the backstory. The discussion about becoming a lawyer only came after a lot of experiences I had throughout my childhood. I'm dyslexic. I grew up in Chicago. I wasn't very good in academics, so I gravitated toward the arts and athletics. I'm not a good painter, but I did make all my clothes at one time. I was successful in that. On the playing field, I was a basketball player, a baton twirler, a tap dancer, and all those things. I did pretty well with that.
When I was in high school, I had a mentor, a nun, Sister Henrietta, who asked me, "What do you love to do most?" I said, "Play basketball." Knowing that I'm a poor student, she said, "You should be a physical education teacher." This is 1962. You can imagine. I said, "That sounds like a lot of fun." I started working at the Chicago Park District as a recreation leader. They gave me the scholarship to go to George Williams College, which was in Hyde Park in Chicago at the time to study physical education while I still worked.
I did that for an entire year, but my grades were just about making it. The next year, I knew I was going to be in trouble but fortunately, one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to my life is the school decided to move. I couldn't go with them because it was in a suburb and I had to continue working. I dropped out of school completely, but I still worked at the Park District.
I started working with children with learning disabilities in 1965 who came to the park. I wrote Mrs. Kennedy Shriver a letter and told her that I was going to put on a citywide track meet and she could sponsor some of it. The city of Chicago was going to have our ten parks competing against each other for the children with learning disabilities. She called me out to Washington. I met with her.
I always felt bad. I didn't know because she didn't ask me if she knew that I wasn't a college graduate. I felt that maybe that was going to be a detriment to what I was doing. However, she only told me that the proposal was unacceptable. It was unacceptable because it wasn't national. If I go home and change the proposal, then it will be a national program. That was the first Special Olympics. That's how it happened. From that, in 1968, I got married.
I have a question for you. How did you decide to send her a letter?
It's because we needed money. The Park District needed money to put the games on. The Kennedy Foundation only sponsored at that time research because of the sister, Rosemary Kennedy. They didn't sponsor government or any other kind of programs out of John Hopkins, but I felt, "Why not?" I always try things. Martin Luther King once said, "If you don't take that first step, you will never see the top of the staircase." I never knew that when I did this, but it was that thought, "If she says no, it's no, but we're still going to put on the games." I wanted it to be special.
For the first game, there were 26 states in Canada. It was a great success. Thereafter, the Kennedy Foundation started its national program and then its international program. I was involved for quite some time. I had my family because I was married before the Special Olympics. I had three children. My husband said, "People will listen to you if you've got your college degree."
That always was kind of guilt for me anyway that I didn't have my college degree, but he provided a lady that helped me with the children. I went back to DePaul University. In the next four years, I got my college degree. When I graduated from college, I had four children. He said, "You should go to law school because you would be a better advocate for the vulnerable in our society."
My point is I've always loved working with children and sports. I got my teaching certificate. The foundation was from my heart. It wasn't because I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to help this particular population. I went on with 4 children under 10 and got my law degree. I ended up in the same situation where I started practicing in abuse and neglect court, adoption court, custody matters, and anything that had to do with children. I participated, among other things, as a lawyer.
My judicial career was another thing. When I graduated from law school, I was 40 years old. It wasn't like I could work for a state attorney's office, a public defender's office, or a big firm. I had a neighborhood office in Chicago on the South side, about eight blocks from my house. I had normal wills, some criminal DUIs, and some major cases too. I took them on because a lot of our friends, being 40 years old, were lawyers. For graduation, they gave me one free murder trial, for instance, to second chair, one of the best criminal lawyers in Chicago, or one free domestic relations case where I would tag along and be the second chair to learn what it was. It was in-service training. I learned a lot about a lot of things.
I stayed very active with Special Olympics as much as I could with my children and all. That was my career. My first judicial career was this. Governor Thompson asked me to be on the court of claims. States generally have sovereign immunity. You can't sue them, but they provide through the legislature ability for contract violations and other kinds of tort violations for people who are state workers. They get hurt and things like that. I was a judge on that. It sits in the appellate court, but I still practice law. I became Governor Edgar's special counsel on child welfare, which was a dream job.
It sounds like it was your interest.
They already knew. That was my background. I did that for a couple of years and then received an opportunity to be appointed to the appellate court. I told the person that was going to nominate me, "I have trouble. I'm dyslexic. I have to read everything a couple of times. I transpose my numbers and my letters. I'm a horrible speller. I don't know how I can do that." She said, "You have law clerks to remedy your misspelling. It is your mind that you need to have."
I said, "I'll give it a try." I fell in love with it. The appellate court was great. The opportunity to be on the Supreme Court years ago came about the same way. Who's going to pass that up? I didn't. Especially on the appellate court, I was able to do a number of other things because we only met once a week. In between, I could do my work. I was the co-chair of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishop Sex Abuse.
I knew that too. That's important.
We didn't hear any cases, so it wasn't in conflict with my work, but it was more policy. That was very interesting. I did a lot of things, but the most fascinating was the cases. That goes back to my beginning. It's about people and the more vulnerable. They happen to be in court. That's a vulnerable state whether they have a lot of money or they don't. Somebody else is going to decide that for you. I'm humbled about having been in that position where I could help people there, too, with common sense and the law.
That's a good observation. No matter what your status in life when you are in a court proceeding and when you're a party to that, there's a certain element of being vulnerable and trusting your dispute in all of this and the law to the particular judges who are deciding it. That is very humbling, as you noted.
It's very frustrating, too, because the law is the law. That's why dissents are important. When something is wrong, you should write a dissent and inform the legislature. They need to do something about this. That has been a wonderful opportunity to let somebody who enacts laws to let them know that this one got it wrong. You can't think of every situation that's going to happen. They have been able to do that by writing a dissent or a special concurring decision. That's wonderful.
There's always that balance of power and roles, too, "Is this something the core can do? Is this something that is for the legislature?" It's keeping that balance.
Another interesting thing in our world is people are not given a good education about our government and the three branches of the government. Even some legislators don't realize we're not an agency. We're a branch of government. Up to now, we're the most stable one. At least in our court, politics isn't involved at all. It's the law. That's the other interesting thing about elections. You go back and forth about judges that are elected and judges that are appointed. The elected judge has to always be responsible to the people. We should not be taking away their words. We should make them know who their judges are and make sure if they aren't judges that they approve of, that they don't reelect them.
For elected positions, even in Illinois over its history, there were originally four judges appointed by the governor. The governor decided he didn't want to do that. The legislature appointed 10 people or 9 people, went back down to 4, and then went back up to 7. That alone, going back and forth, is instability under the law. People need stability in knowing what the law is and what it isn't and who's administering it. To have a governor and the legislature go back and forth like that doesn't give the branch of government trustworthiness.
That's a good point. The perception is important in terms of the institution, both the stability and whether it can be used as a political tool or not. That could be perceived that way when that's going back and forth.
There's a little historical case in which that did happen. There were only four justices on the Illinois Supreme Court in the 1800s. Ashley Stephen Douglas was representing a client in a very particular politically heated case, but he lost and took it to the Supreme Court. There were three wigs. Those were Republicans and one Democrat. He lost the case. He was furious. He went to the legislature and got the legislature to appoint five more people to the Supreme Court, of which he was one of them. He was an Illinois Supreme Court judge for two years, but he got the legislature through the lobby from 4 to 5. The majority was Democrats. One of them was him. That's a good example. It's a real example.
That's for sure. There have been periods of history when that happened. It's rotating through. It's not a new idea that some people are talking about now.
That's why we have to remember that these branches of the government, especially the judiciary, have a long history of stare decisis and how we got to where we are now to have a branch of government that generally is well respected. With the current atmosphere and the climate in the country, trust is starting to erode, at least at the national level. If the judiciary isn't trustworthy, what happens then?
The courts serve, as you noted at the outset, for problem-solving. When people cannot solve problems themselves, they entrust those problems to the judiciary. If you're entrusting those things to a branch that you no longer respect or trust, that's a big problem. There's your point also about the civics education and the importance of that and that it continues and be done earlier, like Sandra Day O'Connor's iCivics project and things like that trying to make sure that education is there.
In Illinois, we have a legislative commission called the Illinois Supreme Court Historic Preservation Commission. The legislature created it to do the history of Illinois in the law. I personally have taken a great interest in this in my time on the Supreme Court. I'm not a historian, but I love history. What we do with regard to education is we have a series called the History on Trial series. We look for cases from Illinois that are significant. The law has changed significantly from the time this person was accused of something until now.
For instance, Mary Todd Lincoln was committed under the Lunatic Act of 1875. She was put on trial. Her son, Robert, caused her to be put on trial because she was acting strangely. There is a lot of history about Mary Todd Lincoln. This was all in Illinois. She was self-medicating and things like that. Her husband and children died. I can see that, but she had a problem before.
We decided to take that case, go through the court files, and do some scripts. We partnered with DePaul University's Theater School and the State Board of Education. We got a script and actors together. DePaul put on a trial with costumes for forensic lawyers, one for Mary and one for the prosecution. The jury was the audience, but she was being tried under today's mental health code. We had all the evidence on stage. The jury was given instructions, which is the audience with clickers, "Is she guilty? Is she mentally ill? Should she be incarcerated?"
The jury found that she was mentally ill, but there was no involuntary incarceration because she could be medicated and live at home and things like that under new laws and things like that. As a result, the state board of education for the middle and high schools did a two-week curriculum with our scripts. They put on their trials and discussed the law of mental health.
We have done Joseph Smith, who was the founder of the Mormon church. He was tried in Illinois. There was a motion, but the motion was thrown out by Ashley Stephen Douglas when he was out of the Supreme Court. Joseph then, six months later, was killed, but that was under habeas corpus, which has changed from the time of Joseph Smith to now. Pre-trial was habeas corpus then, but now it's post-conviction. We did that. That was part of this curriculum.
We have done a racially charged case. It's the turn of the century. Down in Southern Illinois, there's a town called Alton Gregory. It was home to freed slaves who crossed the Mississippi River. They started living there, went to the schools, and integrated schools with everybody. They became businessmen, doctors, and everything else when then, later in 1920-something, the city council down there wanted to have segregated schools.
Scott Bibb was a father of two kids in public schools. He said, "Why? We already have. My children go to school across the streets." He filed a lawsuit in the circuit court county courthouse in Illinois. Six times, it went up to the Illinois Supreme Court. Finally, the Illinois Supreme Court said they are to have integrated schools. This is before any of the other cases. This is an Illinois case. Do you know that the sheriff in that Alton county down there never enforced it until the '50s? He would not enforce the law of Illinois. That's another case we tried.
We're going to do the Black Sox scandal. The White Sox were acquitted of gambling. The gambling laws in 1918 are a lot different than the gambling laws now. We're going to be trying the Black Sox case under today's law. It's fascinating. It's the best tool you possibly can have to teach kids the law and think. If somebody is accused in court, then who handles it in motions and all that other stuff? We give them the whole point.
I like that combination because you're also teaching Illinois history specific to the Illinois courts. You can show that a lot of the state courts were ahead in dealing with issues than coming to the open courts. That's interesting too. You're putting on the trial. They get to see the judicial process in today's laws. That the critical thinking going in terms of, "Laws evolve. They change over time. What is the policy about that?" It's very interesting.
We have been doing that for about years. It has been more fun for us. We have asked all the county clerks throughout the state. We have 102 counties to look for cases of interest so we can go through them and see what cases we want to try. That's very important for education.
It is putting it in an entertaining light as well. People engage with it. That's so neat.
The other thing we do is ride the circuit as they used to in the early years. We go from one district to another. Once a year, we choose, let's say, the third district, which is Ottawa, Illinois. We have a case from there, possibly. People and children are invited. They're given synopsis or Cliffs Notes of the briefs so they know what's going on. The court goes out and rises the circuit. During COVID, we did it virtually.
To some degree, that's good. You get more access even. Here in California, though, the Supreme Court will sit in different locations. It's usually at law school so that the students can see that.
Our focus is more on communities.
That's interesting because our court tries to get to the next generation of lawyers. What you're talking about is the whole community.
We're trying to get to the next generation of lawyers in grammar school and middle school because the law isn't just practicing. That's another one of our red flags. We want to talk to people about it. It's a critical thinking degree. Whatever your heart desires in terms of your love can be an engineer, but you need to have a certain way of thinking about things. That's the law degree. It's perfect.
The show itself began focusing on women judges. That was my interest, but then I started thinking about what you're talking about. If you want to encourage people to think about law school, it usually helps to have a purpose as to why you're going to law school. whether you want to help a certain group of people or whatever you want to do, if people understood that it could be used in so many different ways in business and running nonprofits, how that training is useful would inspire somebody to go to law school whereas some other career possibilities wouldn't.
Law schools don't have it right. I have two daughters. Both of them are lawyers. One of them tried the big firm, the state attorney's office, and all that. She's a real people person. She was very good at what she did, but she wasn't personally happy. She wanted to get more involved in things. In one of the large hospitals in Chicago, she applied for a job as the Director of External Affairs. They hired her because she was a lawyer. They hired her because she was a critically thinking person, not to practice but to keep them from getting in trouble.
She dealt with intergovernmental affairs, contractors, people at the last minute, and all that stuff, "Call this person." That's what she did. She has a group of people working for her. Her critical thinking is why they hired her. It could be backward if you're doing something you like, even if it's accounting. I don't know why anybody likes that. You could be better at accounting if you have a law degree. It could be the opposite. A lot of schools now, like my older university, has an online JD program for three years. Why not? You don't have to practice law.
There are so many different things. That's a good point too. Even if you're thinking about a career transition to practicing law, it's more like, "Does that add another skillset or layer to what I'm doing already that would make me more effective in what I'm doing now?"
That's the key. They're doing it because they probably like it. I hope people are doing what they like to do. That's the major thing. Every day I got up and was happy because I was thrilled to do everything I'd been doing, even as a gym teacher. I still consider myself now that I'm chief. I do the layup, and everybody else does the free throws, the dribbles, and things like that. I have a great team. That's the way my position as chief or supervisor is. I've been doing it since grammar school.
You were mentioning the sports background. I have a friend who was a competitive college athlete. She uses so much of the teamwork, the training, and the leadership from that experience running her law firm and leading teams on cases. It's very helpful to her.
It's what you learn on the 50-yard line sometimes. It's fun. In that way, you know what to do next.
She has a great way of building up her team and knowing how to allocate the work and all of this stuff. She does it well. That comes from her.
Knowing that play is wrong, try another one. Don't worry about it. Change it. No one is wrong.
That comes from not looking backward too much and moving, "Here we are now. Where do we go?" and not ruminating over it. That's her approach. It's good. Something that we don't necessarily get in law school is that leadership training or how to work with a group of people and move them forward.
They populate the schools too much with academics and not adjuncts who are in the field, which is important.
Schools are populated with too much academics instead of adjuncts that are in the field.
We have a different perspective. That's for sure. I teach adjuncts in a Ninth Circuit appellate clinic, which I've done for a long time. I've noticed that we have different perspectives on things because we're in practice. We're like, "That might work, but in reality, here's the way to do it."
Both of them talking to each other are good. Every class should have an adjunct and a professor, not that they would not respect each other. They would, but one has the hands-on. It's not just all about academics. That's for sure.
It's a different perspective on the problem. When I'm working on an appeal, I would rather have all the different perspectives on how we address or present the issues in the case because you have your perspective. Maybe somebody else has a different one. You want to take all of that into account when you're deciding which direction to go.
It's back to the gym again for me. I always say, "You have to think about who you are talking to in a situation." Is it a jury trial? All that changes. You've got to think about who you're talking to. On paper, all your emotions and everything will be there to preserve things. If you're talking to the judge, that's a different story, but if you've got the jury there, you better talk to them. They're the ones that are going to decide this case. I don't think a lot of professors look at it that way.
As an appellate lawyer, I certainly look at it that way. When we're in the trial court, I'm like. "We would like you to prevail at trial and respond to the appeal, not the appellant." We understand there are different decisions that need to be made because your decision-maker there are members of the jury. That's different than the appellate court.
You take that into account when you're doing the strategy that you're doing in each court. There's a pragmatism to that. There are some people who are more theoretical. Maybe more appellate lawyers who haven't done litigation or trial work are like, "The perfect thing we want to see for the Court of Appeal is this." The priority is that you do not have to be arguing that in the Court of Appeals. We're going to work here first.
Tell a judge that the lawyer or the judge made a mistake here. One of your questions was, "How can lawyers help judges?" The best answer to that for me is to tell a story. Don't be so citing footnote 88 or this particular case. We're going to read the cases. Give us the difference and why this case is distinguished from that case. Tell the story about why it is. That's more helpful.
Lawyers can help judges by telling a story. The judges will definitely read the case, and lawyers should explain why it is distinguished from others.
It's being too technical about individual caseloads.
In oral arguments, it's in the brief. We're going to read it but, "What's in your mind? What are you thinking?" That's what we want to hear.
That's a helpful argument. You've written the brief. You've got all the details in there, but at a higher level, what is at the core of this case and the core issue? At your level of court, you're also thinking about not just the case in front of you but the impact on other cases.
I have no qualms about reversing other cases. If they're wrong, they're wrong. Some people are more interested in trying to keep stare decisis. I keep on saying, "Why? It's wrong. It's going off the rails." Sometimes I write a dissent on that and get another vote on the majority. It's a wonderful way in which to decide issues. They have a court thinking about things and what your case is about. That's why I'm so excited about getting out to the community and talking to people about how important it is that you have a good judiciary and lawyers and follow the law, so we have some stability in our country.
I know some lawyers who are advocates who say, "I have an oral argument, but I don't know if it makes a difference to the outcome. I'm not sure how important that is ultimately when I've filed the briefs on appeal." What has been your experience with that?
This could say the same thing about a trial case. Nobody can predict that. You never know. Oral arguments can make a difference. I've seen it over the years. We read the briefs before oral arguments, but I don't get into the weeds of the case. Otherwise, I would be constrained to ask questions that may be stupid. No one is going to say they're stupid, but I want to hear the answers to my question. The lawyers say, "That doesn't count," but it does.
That's why I asked the question. Conversations and back-and-forth are good. We're going to read that case. They have our attention to tell us what this is about. That's what an oral argument means. I know that in our appellate court, having oral arguments is on the wane. Lawyers are asking for the briefs alone. That's a sad thing.
I would be surprised. As an advocate in an appeal, if it's my choice as opposed to the court's choice about arguments, I would rather be there every time because it's your only opportunity to have that conversation you're talking about. If questions arise, you want to be able to answer them, look at the big picture of the case, and boil down the fundamental issues. That's a golden opportunity. I can't imagine not taking that if you have the chance.
It's too bad. Some of it might be some money reasons. It's expensive, but the appellate court generally is the last court. We decide which cases we take. It's not automatic. That's why appellate advocacy is where the work gets done.
Your court and almost every other state Supreme Court have a discretionary review on what you decide to hear. What about brief writing? Do you have any tips on brief writing or things that are most helpful that you like?
They don't have to do every page. If the rule says you can only have 55 pages, you don't have to do 55 pages. Make sure you're citing and spelling properly. Make it a little more readable as opposed to theoretical. The problem lately is the fact that young people aren't given opportunities to take a pencil and write things down. You can think about it and spend some time. They learned to be on a computer system at two years old. That's a little different process for your brain when you think.
I notice it. I thought it was for those of us who started longhand writing and weren't native to computers.
If you want to write something down and you write a letter, you want to write it and think about it differently. It's the same thing for briefs. Nobody knows cursive anymore. I don't know how anybody is going to be able to read legal documents, wills, and things that are old because everything was handwritten. Law schools or even colleges should teach cursive to people, so they have the knowledge. A lot of things are written. Our youngest son is 26. All he does is print. He doesn't know cursive. I can write a letter to him, and he can't read it.
I haven't considered that part. People don't do that as often.
I have nine grandchildren. I have three in college. They can't read cursive. The rest are in grammar school. They're not being taught cursive.
I hadn't thought about the implication of that. I do think it does affect the way you think about things. You process and remember things differently when you write them down through the process of going through the hand and writing it.
It makes a big difference.
It's that whole mind-body connection when you're doing that.
Your brain is a muscle too. You have to think about what you're putting down. It's almost art. You're thinking about this stroke and then realize after you what you said. It's not so quick.
I take notes on an iPad. I never remember what those notes are. I have them and they're easy to read, but I forget much more quickly what it was I took down. If I handwrite those, it's not the case because I've internalized them. I still make edits in hand on briefs when I get them from people. They're like, "Why aren't you redlining?" All the newer people are like, "What is this handwriting?"
They don't know. I'm not changing that. I've learned all the electronics and everything like that as much as I can, but if something happens, then I freak out. My grandchildren help me with some of it. Writing is an important factor. Doing all this history and going back in history, everything is written. All of Abraham Lincoln's briefs are written. Orders are written and stuff. You miss so much.
The joy of going back, looking at their original documents, and seeing that is its own experience also.
That might be something for law school to think about. You've asked about mentoring. In colleges, they should be teaching cursive. It's practical. My whole point in talking about this is the writing coming up to us is horrific and awful. People can't formulate paragraphs and sentences. It's done in a rush. It's cut and paste.
I see grammar issues with writing that I consider more fixable than others, "You need to understand the roadmap and the rules. We can do that. It could be fixed." There are other aspects of writing that I see even with the law students that I teach. There's a critical thinking gap that I'm like, "There's a lack of clarity. I can try to edit this, but until you have the clarity of thinking, you're going to keep repeating things and the same issues."
Is outlining things being taught anymore? Outline what you're doing.
I still do.
What about your students? Do you tell them to do outlines?
Yeah.
I wonder about some teachers. Surely, everybody does everything so fast. They just type it.
I suppose that's a good thing that appellate clinics and classes teach. There has to be a certain amount of patients when you're working on the brief. It isn't something that you're going to dash off. This could be 1 month or 2 months of work figuring out the framework for the brief, writing the brief, and editing it. I hope there's something from those classes that the students take away even if they're not appellate lawyers about the care with which you need to write.
Every lawyer has to write. They have to do motions.
That's why the clinics and the appellate classes are good for everyone, even if they're not going to be appellate lawyers because that's core training. I've done that with the new associates in the law firm too. I get them all trained. I get their core writing skills down and research. They go off to do litigation or something else. It's nice to have helped someone in their formative years get a good footing. It's rewarding.
It helps the profession. If you're such a good mentor, then your mentee will be a good mentor, too, because they know how helpful it is. I've had so many in my life. Sister Henrietta was my first one. Even Miss Shriver calling my proposal unacceptable taught me a lesson. Everything I've done is unacceptable because it can always be improved. That's the lesson.
If you are a good mentor, your mentee will be a good mentor too.
It's also not being afraid to think big. She's saying, "Think bigger. It's such a great idea. It needs to be everywhere, not just in this one place." That can be hard for us to see or acknowledge. That's always good. Ask yourself, "Am I thinking big enough? Let me make sure."
It has been great.
The only way to give to show appreciation for the people who have done that for you is to pay it forward to others.
Give what knowledge you have away.
I hadn't thought of it before, but I'm like, "I hope I'm creating mentors in the future."
You are.
They will do that for others, which is important. It's so good for our profession to have that. What makes it at least traditionally special is that you have that apprenticeship aspect. You have certain things. You pay it forward to the next group of lawyers. That's what we do, whether it's pro bono work or working with newer lawyers. It's a profession, not a business. At least we hope for a little while longer. Do you have any particular advice for law students or lawyers who might be thinking at some point that they might be interested in exploring being on the bench?
One of my mentors told me, "If you have to ask yourself the question, you already know the answer." If you're thinking about what's the bench like, then what do lawyers do? They do due diligence. I wanted to know whether I would like probate court. I went over to our daily center here and sat in all the probate courses for about a week. I fell in love with every case. That's what you need to do. That was not wanting to be a judge but want to know if I liked that area of the law.
That's true for everything. I call it checking out the field, "How does the game look? Is that something I want to get on the field?"
You have to watch. It's different for everybody. You can watch me on the bench or somebody else, but that doesn't tell you what I'm thinking or how people act and respond to you. It's like a movie right in front of you. If you go to court, it's open to everybody. You should do that, see how judges are, and check out the different kinds of judges, why they are different, and who supervises them, "Will I be able to have an impact and all that?" That's what I would do. I would do my due diligence for a new case.
If you're thinking about a different area of the law, who knows? You may decide to change your practice and then move on from there. You can't create those opportunities to run for a judge or to be appointed. They will find you because of your good work. That is how you should feel. With the better work you do, you will stand out to the judges that you appear in front of. They have influence. Talking to people about wanting to be a judge is one thing, but presenting yourself as a good lawyer will get you more scores.
You need to have that considered baseline for the judicial positions. You want to have that reputation for being good at what you do. I like that very practical advice, too, "If you're considering doing something, see what it is and what's involved."
It isn't always what you would think about. You might be very well disappointed.
It's also your point about either different areas of the law or different types of judges because that's also one thing I had hoped through the show. Sometimes people think it's this uniform thing, "Being a judge means it's the same," but it's not at different levels of the court system. Even different kinds of trial judges are doing different things depending on what assignment they have. It's varied. There may be something that you like better.
It depends on the jurisdiction. In downstate Illinois, judges do everything. You're in a small county. You're going to do everything. That's tough. If you were a transaction lawyer and you ended up doing criminal domestic violence and all those others, it's going to set you on fire. There's a large system in Cook County where there are ten courtrooms on the eighteen floor that all do probate. There are evictions, things that are boring, traffic cases, and stuff like that.
It depends on what your love is. You have to like an area of the law. That's why I would say, "Sit in different courtrooms." If you don't like what you're practicing, then you have to change the law that you're practicing because there are other areas of the law that are so fascinating, like probate law. I loved it. It's something you have to have due diligence about and what it's like.
What you think it might be or even studying that area of the law in law school and what it means to practice that can be very different. You want to make sure, "Is that something I would like? What's my day-to-day? What am I doing when I'm practicing that area of the law?" I went to law school thinking I was going to do international law. I found out those are treaties. There's not a lot of going court on that, "Maybe I'll do something else." I did my due diligence. I got to law school, too, but it's always good to have a reason to go to law school. It might change once you're in law school.
I went in because I had a reason. I wanted to be a better advocate. That would be a better way of doing it. It wasn't because I wanted to be a lawyer. This has been fun talking to you.
Thank you so much, Chief Justice, for engaging in this and sharing your thoughts, especially about civics education and writing. All of that is important admonitions. I appreciate you doing this on taking the time to talk.
I enjoyed our conversation. It's fun.
Thank you so much. I appreciate it. It has been lovely getting to know you a little bit and talking to you.
Likewise. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Take care.