Judging Titles
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Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy Per Curiam
JUDGING TITLES
BENJAMIN BEATON*
Editor's Note: This is the first installment in JLPP: Per Curiam's series titled Obiter Dicta, which
will feature speeches and other works by judges from across the country.
The text below is modified slightly, for clarity and non-concision, from an address delivered at the
investiture of Judge Benjamin Beaton on May 20, 2022, at The Palace Theatre in Louisville,
Kentucky. Consistent with Judge Beaton's advice to members of the bar, this abridgement omits a
platitudinous litany of humble acknowledgements familiar to the genres of judicial ceremony and
academic legal writing alike. In their stead, this scholarly republication adds an equally familiar
(and no less unwelcome) profusion of footnotes, several of which bear a tenuous relationship to the
law. A year into a lifetime of answering to Your Honor, Judge Beaton urged the assembled
lawyers to resist that ungrammatical and un-American honorific: at least in his courtroom, the
title is factually dubious and legally misconceived. Article III invests judicial power-to interpret
laws, decide disputes, and explain rulings-that rests on authority external to and independent of
any status or nobility. Emphasizing the role of Judge, rather than the status of Your Honor,
better serves jurists, litigants, and the rule of law.
The lawyers here today are the ones I'd like to address most directly, because my appointment
and oath affect you and your clients most directly. Our conversations are usually clipped and
formal, recorded by the court reporter and measured in 6-minute billing increments. Today I have
a little longer to reiterate and explain an idiosyncratic request some of you heard during our early
hearings: Good morning, Your Honor, you all would politely say. That's correct, Your
Honor. Good point, Your Honor. . . . Finally I'd interject: Counsel, enough with this 'Your
Honor' stuff. Please just call me Judge.
Now please don't worry about a rap on the knuckles for using this most customary of phrases
in Louisville's Courtroom 2: as a Burkean, I understand that old habits can and should die hard.'
Rest assured you aren't at risk of sanctions. Though let me insert a broad disclaimer that I'm not
* District Judge, United States District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. Many thanks are due to the clerks and
interns who, in their role as loyal critics, helped develop the ideas set out in this speech and-far more important-helped
deploy them in judicial decisions.
1 See EDMUND BURKE, REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 52 (Frank M. Turner ed., 2003) (1790) ([I]t is with
infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for
ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility
before his eyes.).
1
Fall 2022
No. 29](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hpercrm2022&div=29&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Judging Titles
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