Continuing education
Doctors have to do it. So do teachers, pilots and accountants. Why shouldn’t judges have mandated ongoing training, too?
State Sen. Liz Krueger (D -Manhattan) floated the idea at a budget hearing last week, and really, it seems like a no-brainer: Lots of professions mandate in-service training. To suggest that judges should get it, too, is not to imply they aren’t qualified. It’s to acknowledge that the law — including the laws that govern how we enforce the law — is not a static body of work.
What makes it a potentially touchy subject is that Sen. Krueger’s suggestion came during a discussion that involved the state’s revised bail laws. Since the rollout of new bail policies, politicians, prosecutors and advocates for the accused have all pointed at cases in which a judge could have set bail but didn’t, sparking debates on whether judges, through misinterpretation or a lack of clarity, are applying the bail laws as intended.
Sen. Krueger said the idea of a training mandate is not connected to judges’ implementation of bail laws. Nonetheless, it could clear up some of the questions about how judges are interpreting legislative intent.
Some of those questions could likely be answered now: Judges have been given guidelines on how to implement the bail provisions, including a list of what charges are bail-eligible, but the Office of Court Administration will not make those guidelines public. “Those are internal training materials and not designed to be shared outside of the court system,” Justin Barry, chief of administration at the OCA, told legislators.
And why not? The Legislature has an interest in seeing how judges are being advised to implement bail laws, and assessing how the guidelines measure up to the law’s intentions. The general public does, too. Lawmakers should continue to press for this one.
The OCA’S acting Chief Administrative Judge Tamiko Amaker told legislators that of the 1,300 New York City judges presiding in criminal cases, about 1,000 of them took optional training on the bail laws. That means 23 percent of them did not take the training. For a structural change on the magnitude of bail reform, frankly, that’s not good enough. And it makes the argument for mandated training even stronger.
Questions of value, and values
In a decision handed down in a patent infringement case over wind turbine parts, a judge noted there might be a greater issue in play than who owns rotor technology — the health of the planet.
Finding that General Electric violated a patent owned by Siemens Gamesa, U.S. District Court Judge William Young wrote:
“This struggle does nothing to advance the public interest of the people of the United States or any other nation. Indeed, it inhibits efforts to combat climate change world-wide. It would be far, far better for these two corporate behemoths … to cross license their particular technological contributions and forge ahead with production in the global public interest.”
It’s a sobering observation — akin to arguments we’ve made in the past for products like patented medicines and vaccines, including the COVID -19 vaccine: There comes a point at which the pursuit of profit — even for those deservedly reaping the rewards of research and hard work — is not inviolate, and must give way to a greater good.
Where that point is, we’ll let philosophers and ethicists decide. But while they debate it, the clock is ticking.