Document Type

Report

Publication Date

10-2001

Abstract

The Baton Rouge Bar Association seeks to provide the public, lawyers, and the judges with some sort of evaluation of the judges in the Baton Rouge area. Since it is difficult for the public to obtain information on judges, the Bar Association relied on its own members and the members of the Louis Martinet Society to evaluate all judges, including city, state, and federal courts. Hopefully, the results will be useful to the public, the lawyers, and especially to the judges. Most judges can take satisfaction in the high regard with which they are held by the hundreds of lawyers who responded to the survey. A few will see areas where they might choose to improve. The Bar Association recognizes that there are differing opinions as to what constitutes a ΓÇ£goodΓÇ¥ judge. Therefore the lawyers were asked to rate the judges on twenty-seven specific characteristics that are grouped into five general areas: judicial temperament, integrity, impartiality, professional competence, and work ethic. For each of the twenty-seven characteristics, the judges are categorized into four ΓÇ£tiersΓÇ¥. Tier I are the judges who were rated positively by 85% or more of the lawyers. Tier II are judges who were rated positively by 70-84% of the lawyers. Tier III are judges who were rated positively by 55-69%, and Tier IV are judges who were rated positively by less than 55% of the lawyers. These fifteenΓÇôpoint intervals were created to provide a rough categorization scheme. You will notice that judges at the top of Tier III, for example, are not very differently evaluated than judges at the bottom of Tier II. Any judge that appears consistently in Tiers I or II is evaluated very positively by the lawyers. If you are interested in the full range of responses for any particular judge or characteristic, please refer to the two appendices. It should be emphasized that these results represent the perceptions of the lawyers who chose to respond to the survey. They are not objective measures of the quality of any of the judges.

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