IOJT Newsletter

With the assistance of the senior staff at our two judicial education organizations, the National Judicial Institute and the Canadian Institute for Judicial Education, we began about six years ago, as a small group of judges who had been involved for some time in judicial education, to plan a program for longer-serving judges. We identified a working group of judges from across Canada , eight or so in number. Through a series of conference calls, we sought to identify the learning objectives that would be valuable for longer-serving judges and the type of delivery model, in terms of group size, topics and structure that would be most effective.

Since then we have held three sessions for longer-serving judges, about one every two years, each for two and a half days. We have another scheduled for next month.

We obtain questionnaire responses form the participants that we use to try to refine and improve the program.

From the outset, it seemed to our working group that what was needed for longer-serving judges was a forum, indeed a colloquium, in which they could be encouraged to use their experience to identify ways that longer service can be made most productive for judges and their work.

Three general topics emerged as the most important. Each of these can fairly be expressed in terms of skills.

The first is how to maintain and enhance our judicial decision-making skills. As this topic has developed in our sessions, it has included judges participating in an exercise with legal academics exploring ways that important concepts in our law are changing in their application by the courts. And we are interested in ways that long service affects the way judges deal with routine cases and frequently recurring types of cases.

The second general skills topic is how to maintain our personal engagement in our work. This includes learning to deal with one's circumstances as a judge: the kind of judicial work that is received by the judge, circumstances relating to aging, and the public context in which we do our work. We have addressed types of learning skills in the context of professional work, and questions that arise from judicial isolation, including geographic isolation. And we find that longer-serving judges are very interested in stress management relating in part to the greater critical attention paid by the media to cases in the courts.

The third general topic is how to use our long service to help our judicial colleagues. This has led us to look at programs for mentoring by longer-serving judges for newly appointed judges. We examine proposals for new judicial education programs to see if we can make suggestions for the design of these programs. And we try to assess developments in the judicial environment, such as expert evidence in a world of swiftly expanding information and knowledge.

With respect to the mode of delivery for our program, we believed that longer-serving judges would place importance on maximum collegial exchange. This meant that the group could not be too large. We have kept the group size to around 20 to 30 judges, so that we can be a colloquium.

To ensure maximum collegial exchange we employ a relatively open structure. We think having a structure is important. The alternative of an unstructured gathering of longer-serving judges for two to three days seemed to us to have obvious drawbacks. Discussion could become aimless, unfocussed, repetitive and too vulnerable to individual urgencies.

On the other hand, too much structure could stifle collegial exchange. We know that our longer-serving judges do not want such a program to employ a teacher/student delivery mode.

We identified the aim of the structure to be: to provide order and focus and to stimulate collegial exchange. So, we employ a combination of formal and informal presentations.

In our formal presentations, we use videos, panels, hypothetical scenarios, legal academics and outside experts. In these presentations, we ensure that judges are participants. We engage theoretical issues but we emphasize practical implications: how will the subject of our discussion help our work? And in our formal presentations we reserve adequate time for discussion among the entire group.

Our informal presentations take various forms. We have a video in which a number of judges offer their individual reflections on the best features of their judicial experience and how they might do some things differently in the light of experience.

We have invited a retired senior judge, in fact a former Chief Justice, to reflect on long judicial service from the judge's personal experience.

And, partly by accident, we developed a new form of collegial exchange after the group's official dinner. It could be entitled, "My Most Embarrassing Moment in the Courtroom". After one judge rises to tell such a story others are willing to tell their own. This is obviously a very collegial exchange, because we are taking each other into our confidence. And it renews our sense of proportion about ourselves. So it is good therapy, as well as good fun.

The questionnaire responses we receive are generally very favorable and encouraging. At the same time, it appears that a program of this kind appeals best to a minority of judges. Whether it would have a broader appeal if it were designed differently, and whether that would be desirable, are open questions.

After our next session, we will need to appraise our accumulated experience further in order to consider how this project should evolve in the future.

Justice James M. Spence