Colorado Supreme Court
Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel
Promoting Professionalism. Protecting the Public.
New Chief Justice is Chief Educator
Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice
Nancy Rice sees one of her biggest roles as educating the public about the rule
of law.
By JAMES CARLSON
Winter 2014
There is a
theory of good legal advocacy that sees the attorney as a storyteller. But if
you were to take a class taught by Colorado Supreme Court Chief Justice Nancy
Rice, you’d hear a different concept of lawyering.
“She’d say
to us, ‘You’re educators first,’” said Laura McNabb, a former student of Rice’s
at the University of Colorado Law School and now her
law clerk. “‘If anything you’re saying isn’t going to help educate the judge
and educate the jury, then don’t say it.’”
Rice has
lived that concept in her time in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, during her tenure
on the Denver District Court and in her 15 years on the Supreme Court. Now,
after she was sworn in earlier this month as the state’s 45th chief
justice, she will expand her belief in educating while adjudicating.
Rice will
continue initiatives begun by her predecessor, Chief Justice Michael Bender,
and will push the court system to be more transparent in its processes. One of
her biggest goals is to better educate the public about the role of the
judiciary and the “near genius design” of America’s legal system.
“I think
people understand the system around the edges,” Rice said. “I see a big part of
my function is to make people think about it consciously.”
And she will
do it, as always, with what she calls “that understated Wyoming personality.”
‘To my bones’
The Las
Animas County Courthouse sweltered in the summer months of the late 1950s. The
building had no air-conditioning then — it still doesn’t — so visitors often
attended at the expense of their personal comfort.
To a young
Nancy Rice, however, the soaring heat did little to temper her wonderment. The
future Colorado Supreme Court justice, no more than 7 or 8 years old at the
time, often tagged along with her grandfather when he served as bailiff at the
courthouse in Trinidad, Colo. Rice put water on the tables, then sat in the
soft theater-style gallery seats and took it all in. The light filtering
through the stain-glass windows. The attorneys arguing for their clients. The
judge directing the proceedings from the bench.
“There was
nothing about it that didn’t excite me to my bones,” Rice said.
That initial
flicker of interest never burned out.
After high
school, she went east to Tufts University and then attended the University of Utah College of Law where she was one of 10 female
students in a class of 100. “We were still interesting but not that interesting, so it was possible to
get by on your merits.”
Rice was
hired at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 1977 where she started at the bottom.
She worked dog-off-leash cases and camping-too-close-to-the-roadway cases. It
could have been seen as menial work, but it also allowed her to “get a sense of
what it is to be a prosecutor and what it is to prove a case.”
Her style
was “very logical, very humble,” said U.S. Magistrate Judge Kristen Mix, who
interned under Rice in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the early 1980s. There’s a
lot of sloppiness in trial lawyering, Mix said, a lot of harping on unimportant
information. Rice, though, “she just had a knack for understanding what’s important
and presenting it clearly. She wasn’t over the top. She never protested too
much. She just presented the facts in a dispassionate and logical way so that
you almost couldn’t help but agree with her.”
Rice credits
this to her Western upbringing.
No drama
When Rice
visited the courthouse from her childhood recently, she walked past a stone
carved with “1912,” the date the structure was built. The courthouse’s roots go
deep. So do Rice’s.
Her mother’s
father was a Colorado homesteader. So was her father’s. Both of her parents
attended the University of Colorado in Boulder, and after a brief stint in
Texas, the family moved to Cheyenne, Wyo. Up there,
“Things are what they are,” Rice said. “People don’t tend to be dramatic about
everything. As a trial lawyer, people respond to that. It feels honest, it
feels sincere.”
She believes
that sensibility translated well to the Denver District Court where she was
appointed in 1987. “It was easier to keep myself out of the fray, to listen and
not react too quickly, to be thoughtful when other judges might have wanted to
get more involved.”
After a
decade on the bench, Rice was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1998 by Gov.
Roy Romer. Even on the high court, Rice’s pragmatic
approach is apparent, said McNabb. “If you watch her in oral arguments, her
questions always seem to come back to the practical concerns.”
Justice as teacher
Jeremy Beck
remembers Rice’s “even keel” temperament. Beck, also a law clerk for Rice,
first met her when he took her motions advocacy class at the CU Law. “In the
abstract, it can be intimidating because you’re before one of the seven
justices. But it felt like a collaborative seminar. She was playful and low-key
and constructive.”
McNabb
remembers Rice’s direct approach to trial advocacy: light on the theatrics,
heavy on the matter-of-fact presentation. “She didn’t like the fluff,” McNabb
recalls.
For Rice,
teaching is a respite from the sometimes insular life on the Supreme Court. “I
like the students because they make me laugh, and they very quickly don’t take
me seriously.”
In one class
a few years ago, McNabb was doing a mock closing argument about stolen gloves
and repeatedly referred to the gloves as “the gun” by accident. Rice chuckled a
little, McNabb said. Then in a kind, almost deadpan tone, Rice said to McNabb,
“I think that might have been a mistrial.”
‘You aren’t a good judge unless …”
That story
wouldn’t surprise David Stark, who is chair of the Supreme Court’s Advisory
Committee. “She’s gentle and compassionate,” he said of Rice, “but she also has
great take-charge skills.”
In addition
to her role hearing cases, the chief justice also serves as administrator for
all of the state’s courts. Rice said she will continue the Chief Justice
Commission on the Legal Profession, set up by former Chief Justice Bender. Its
four working groups are developing ideas to better address the needs of the
legal profession and the community as a whole.
She also
will travel the state talking to judicial districts and to non-attorney groups.
The latter is particularly important, Rice said, because it addresses the issue
of what the legal community calls “procedural fairness.” (Rice finds the name
“off-putting” and said she might just label the issue “fairness.”) Its moniker
aside, the concept is that whatever the outcome of a legal proceeding, the
proceeding was administered fairly. Studies show that participants better
accept a ruling, even if it goes against them, when they understand how that
ruling was reached.
Rice knows
from her time on the district court that dockets can pile up and that it’s easy
for a judge to want to get straight to the decision and spend little time explaining the decision. That’s a
mistake, she says. That educating skill isn’t peripheral to a judge’s role;
it’s central.
“It doesn’t
matter how smart you are or how right you are on the law,” she said. “You
aren’t a good judge unless the people in your courtroom feel that you’re fair
and that their voice was heard. It’s all about how people understand the
decision.”
James Carlson is the Information
Resources Coordinator for the Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. If you
have an idea for the OARC Update, contact him at j.carlson@csc.state.co.us.