by Chief Justice G. Richard Bevan

Delivered to the Idaho Senate and Idaho House of Representatives on January 17, 2024

Introductory Remarks

I am honored to stand here before you for a fourth time as chief justice. And really, I don’t stand here on my own. Also standing here are our 159 trial and appellate judges — including newly appointed Justice Cynthia K.C. Meyer, who I hope you all get a chance to meet. Welcome, Justice Meyer!

I also represent, as the face of the judiciary, our hundreds of court clerks, our various court administrators, law clerks, court reporters, court assistance officers and all the many others who help us to accomplish the important work of Idaho’s Judicial Branch of government.

And I stand here on the foundation built by those who came before us — including our recently retired Justice John Stegner. I was honored to work closely with Justice Stegner for his years on the Supreme Court, and I wish him the best in the next stage of his career.

The Rule of Law

A couple of months ago I spent an evening in Twin Falls sharing with an audience why I do what I do. These were everyday folks out on a Monday evening on a college campus, eager to learn. This represented the kind of opportunity I always enjoy as a judge — to help people see how Idaho’s judges advance our grand civics experiment as part of Idaho’s state government.

But there is a gap in the public’s understanding, as I suspect you’d tell me of a gap in public understanding of the legislative branch and the executive. People are aware of courts, but they don’t necessarily think of what courts mean. And they certainly don’t think of what would happen without us.

What is our Judicial Branch? It is fairly simple: Courts provide a fair and peaceful way to resolve disputes, impartially and under an equal rule of law. The law comes from the people in the form of the state and federal constitutions. It comes from those of you in this room, in the form of the laws you write, as well as local ordinances and regulations. Judges apply this wide array of laws to family matters — like adoptions and divorces — to business disputes and property disagreements, to cases for personal injury as well as criminal proceedings. We resolve these cases based on this body of law, together with the facts developed through a trial or discovery process.

That last part is essential to the work we perform. John Adams said that the “very definition of a Republic is ‘an Empire of Laws and not of men.’” Our branch is the embodiment of the American ideal that everyone answers to the law and answers equally. The rule of law is a fundamental cornerstone without which our society would flounder.

There are several ways to describe the rule of law. I have heard it put as the reason we will stop at a red light late in the evening, with no one around. Why do we stop? Because the rule of law is so entrenched in most of us that we don’t give it a second thought. The rule of law doesn’t mean that the police are in charge; it means that we all answer to the same laws.

The rule of law is visible when we pay our taxes on time or when divorced parents throughout this state shuttle their children across town to fulfill custody arrangements. The people who follow judges’ orders in these cases may not agree with them. But they follow those orders anyway because they respect the laws and the courts that enforce them. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “[T]he rule of law does more than ensure freedom from high-handed action by rulers. It ensures justice between man and man however humble the one and however powerful the other.” Really, the rule of law is the glue that keeps us all functioning as one, that helps us navigate life with our neighbors.

In the Judicial Branch, our patriotic purpose in coming to work each day is to build on the centuries of solid evidence that an independent court system is best equipped to impartially decide questions of law — and then equally apply the law “without sale, denial, delay, or prejudice,” to quote Article I, Section 18 of the Idaho Constitution.

We have seen elsewhere in the world what happens if the rule of law is subverted. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once wrote that “[t]here can be no free society without law administered through an independent judiciary. If one man can be allowed to determine for himself what is law, every man can. That means first chaos, then tyranny.”

Each year that I come here, it is to partner with you to uphold and sustain this rule of law. Truly, the fates of our public duties are tied together. If the rule of law falters in our courts, it also falters in this statehouse.

But nothing is simple these days, is it? The people whom we serve and the society in which we operate have become more fractured. People have forgotten the nature of the broad social contract that allowed us to form this state, this nation.

The issues that become high-profile wedges in our society have successfully distracted us from the many things we agree on. My hope, then, is to focus today on our joint obligation to maintain our rule of law.

Supporting the Rule of Law in Our Courts

It is an eventful time to work in the judiciary, for many reasons. Just the sheer volume of work can be a challenge to convey.

We’ve been frank with you in recent years about our case filing trends — both here and nationally, the overall trend is a small decline in civil cases. But we still handle more than 140,000 new court cases a year across one of the most geographically spread-out states in the Union. Those cases are often more complex, and they are drawing more attention — look, for example, at the national followings for some of our recent criminal proceedings.

Even everyday cases require more focus than before. In Idaho, we maintain audio recordings of all court hearings as part of the official court record — the record my colleagues and I rely on when reviewing a case on appeal. That audio is kept in a dedicated system devoted to this purpose. In 2023, that system received nearly 62,000 hours of court audio. That’s nearly a 10% increase from the same time period four years before. While Idaho has gained judges in that time, we are also seeing more court filings involving arguments that require more courtroom time to resolve.

Our courts perform this work amid a backdrop of increased agitation toward government institutions. I spoke to you at length last year about the security threats our judges and court staff face. That situation has not improved.

Our courts in 2023 handled 60,000 newly filed criminal cases, 23,000 cases involving family law, 14,000 probate cases, 5,000 juvenile cases, plus those carried over from previous years. Many of these cases resolve quickly with little fanfare. Some become incredibly contentious. Underlying many of these cases are issues of mental health, substance abuse, homelessness, and neglect.

All it takes is one person making a bad choice in one of these situations for the unthinkable to occur. Thank goodness that we are not among states like Maryland or Wisconsin where judges or their family members were murdered in recent years, or Nevada where a judge was violently attacked in the courtroom just this month. But I still fear we are not far from that point.

Even so, we carry on undaunted. Enter one of our courts and you’ll find a devoted workforce accomplishing feats I personally find incredible. Our judges must pivot from case to case and issue to issue while remaining fully present in each. Our clerks not only keep the whole system moving, they are our public face, helping users of the court system — and often managing interactions colored by those personal crises I just described.

Supporting these groups behind the scenes is another invaluable team. Here in Boise and across each of our judicial districts, Judicial Branch employees offer technological, financial, and other administrative support to all of our individual courts. Their work isn’t always easy to see — but it would be obvious if they were missing. I am endlessly grateful for their own contributions to maintaining our rule of law.

Supporting the Rule of Law with Our Partners

By Constitution and statute, counties shoulder much of the burden of maintaining local courts. This constitutional partnership — done for budget savings in 1889 — is somewhat unique among courts nationwide. We take it seriously.

For example, we have relaunched a committee to provide elected clerks with more of a voice on court technology. As we work to better secure our digital systems, we are shaping our approach around the counties, acknowledging their unique processes and needs.

The bulk of our state-employed IT support is centralized in Boise while the counties themselves make their own arrangements for local IT. The counties’ needs go beyond just the court system, of course. But starting in the last fiscal year, with your help, we placed an additional court-focused field technician in each judicial district to deploy new technology, solve technical issues and train both county and state employees who provide work for the courts. Feedback to this program across the board has been encouragingly positive and we are working to expand it — it’s hard for a single tech to be both in Benewah and Boundary counties at the same time.

We also now offer a jury management system for counties. Again, managing jurors — summoning them, screening them, providing the information necessary for their work — largely happens at the county level. But through offering this state-funded system, we can provide jurors in any county that signs up with flexible, easy-to-use tools and timely information as they fulfill their own obligation to the rule of law: jury service.

We partner in other contexts — for example, to provide state agencies and even this Legislature with data needed to perform other work. Some of that data can be sensitive. Child protection cases, mental commitments, and even people’s personal financial records require protection. Recently, we’ve worked to improve our data comprehension, both expanding the types and functionality of our reports and, in situations where law requires sensitive data be provided to an outside partner, creating a more secure way to deliver that data.

Our statewide IT team supports not only court operations, but also court users. That number encompasses about 2,900 people, including law enforcement and Idaho Department of Correction employees, who use our system daily to access court records they are entitled to as part of their jobs. Another example: our team helped the Nampa Police Department as that department migrated to using the statewide electronic ticketing system for electronic citations. Examples such as these show the courts’ willingness to partner with others across government for public service. We look forward to continuing these partnerships in 2024.