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46 Judges J. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/judgej46 and id is 1 raw text is: INTODUCIO Guidelines for Judicial Performance Evaluation An Interview with Judge Cheryl Cesario a By Keith Roberts or many state and local judges, the topic Are you fit to be a judge? becomes a concern every few years at election time. Then it doesn't mean how's your health? so much as how good a judge are you? To help provide answers for judges in retention elections, the ABA in 1985 approved and published Guidelines for Judicial Evaluation. About a dozen states use such evaluations today.' More recently, as judicial accountabili- ty has become more of a public issue, the ABA wanted to update the Guide- lines to help the public evaluate judges as well. Six of the thirty-nine states with judicial elections now publicize official evaluations-Alaska, Arizona, Connecticut, New Mexico, Tennessee, and Utah-and private organizations increasingly publish their own. As the nonjudicial branch of the Judicial Division, it seemed appropri- ate for the Lawyers Conference of the Judicial Division to undertake the Hon. Cheryl D. Cesario, the interviewee, is currently a judge for the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago and chaired the performance evaluation committee of the Lawyers Conference of the ABA Judicial Division. Her e-mail is ccesario@sbcglobal.net. Keith Roberts, the interviewer, is the owner of Roberts Proprietaries, Inc. His e-mail is keithofrpi@earthlink.net. TheJudges' Journal • Winter 2007 revision of the Guidelines. Under the leadership of member Cheryl D. Cesario, then assistant director for the Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution at the John Marshall Law School, a process of study and evalua- tion was begun in 2003, and with amazing speed led to the House of Delegates' unanimous approval of new Guidelines in February 2005. Your interviewer had a chance to catch up with the busy Judge Cesario, who was appointed last year to the Domestic Violence Court of Cook County (Chicago), and asked her a few ques- tions about the revised Guidelines. Fr How did this project come about, and how did you proceed? AI have always thought that one of the Lawyers Conference responsi- bilities is to undertake tasks for the judiciary that judges themselves can- not really do. When Anne Kelley, the then-chair of the Lawyers Conference, asked me to undertake the revision of the Guidelines, I felt this was one of those situations and agreed to under- take the job. In consultation with the ABA's Seth Anderson, who had writ- ten about judicial evaluation and was on the staff of the Justice Center and the Standing Committee on Judicial Independence, and through the good offices of the National Judicial College's Judge William Dressel, we enlisted Dr. James T. Richardson and his research assistant Alayna Jehlea of the University of Nevada at Reno's Grant Sawyer Center for Justice Studies to do a literature review. With their report in hand, the Lawyers Conference created a com- mittee with members from all six con- ferences of the Judicial Division, as well as the Standing Committee on Judicial Independence in March 2004. Members included state trial judges, a federal trial judge, administrative law judges, and attorneys from across the country, and we had a lot of help from ABA staff members Aimee Torres, Seth Anderson, and Gilda Fairley. Our goal was to assess the impact of evaluations and the need for changes in the ABA's Guidelines. Dr. Malia Reddick of the University of Missouri-Columbia served as our reporter, helped draft the revised Guidelines, and provided us with a very helpful comparison of the revi- sion with the original. We were under considerable time pressure because the ABA wanted these Guidelines to come out simulta- neously with the new Code of Judicial Conduct, while our most knowledge- able staff member, Seth Anderson, was soon to take another assignment. During the remaining months of 2004, the committee held two in-person meetings and several conference calls, while individual members, particularly Justice Frank Sullivan of the Indiana Supreme Court, did a lot of work in between times. We also circulated drafts for comment to a broad spec- trum of interested parties, including the Conference of State Supreme Court Justices, and those with expertise in judicial performance evaluation. Many of the responses were incorporated into the final version. [ Why did the Guidelines need updating? E The ABA's policy is to review and Vrevise guidelines every ten years, continued on page 4 A

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