Politics as usual by Jim Baron

Toiling in and around the Statehouse for as many years as I have, I have discovered that any time anything REALLY BIG is going to happen, there are rumblings and rumors. You might not know exactly what it is, but you always know that something huge is about to break.

Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams disabused me of that notion last week.
Talk about a big hunk of news dropping out of the sky and landing on your head without notice. The sudden resignation of a chief justice is holy mackerel news, and Williams kept it quiet until he was ready for it to break.
Nothing about Williams’ loquacious tenure on the high court would have led you to believe that he is THAT good at keeping a secret. Everyone from Gov. Donald Carcieri to House Speaker William Murphy to local attorneys said they were as surprised as everyone else by the chief’s Thursday end-of-business bombshell. He only told his court brethren (and sisthren, as one of my Newspaper Guild colleagues used to put it) an hour or so before his letter went to the governor.
So out-of-the-blue was Williams’ action that the governor called to make sure it wasn’t a hoax of some sort when he got the letter. 
What made it so surprising is that Williams is a man who so clearly loved his job. You could see it on his face when he was sitting hearing a case, or giving his annual “State of the Judiciary” address to the General Assembly, or just sitting for a media interview. The man reveres the law and revels in its practice.
I realize that Williams’ time on the court was controversial and not everyone is going to be sorry to see him go.
Nonetheless, his departure from the center seat on the high bench is going to be a loss for the Rhode Island court system and the public that uses it, especially if his successor retrenches from some of the progress Williams has made as the head of the judicial branch.
Simply by being as visible as he was as chief justice, he carried the judiciary several steps forward in the public eye and upward in popular esteem. A plainspoken man in public — sometimes justices just can’t help themselves when it comes to the verbiage of their written decision — Williams could make the often arcane, and to many mysterious, workings of the court system understandable to an audience of legislators, a media interviewer, or to those who heard him speak to a civic or cultural group.
Dragging his fellow justices out of their comfy offices on the seventh floor of the courthouse to what he called — in the spirit of his hero and inspiration, Abraham Lincoln — “ride the circuit” in cities and towns across the state had a similar effect.
Williams often said that one of his principal goals was to make the courts more user-friendly, and the significant extent to which he achieved that will be his lasting legacy.
I, for one, would like to see Williams’ successor, (whomever that might be, which is the guessing game now fascinating those in the corridors of Rhode Island power) take that legacy several more steps forward.
For example, Williams succeeded in making the courts more accessible to minority groups by adding interpreters, so that a person does not receive discounted justice simply because he or she speaks Spanish, or Portuguese or Hmong.
I would like to see that taken further by removing a language from our courtrooms: Latin. Why is it that our laws are written in English, but so much of our jurisprudence is conducted in Latin? Why, in the forum where citizens of a free, 21st century democratic society seek vindications of their constitutional and human rights, do we insist on speaking the language of the Caesars?
The only reason I can think of is that all the Latin mumbo-jumbo renders the law not understandable by the citizen of average intelligence, who therefore finds him or herself forced to hire a lawyer and pay the shyster exorbitant  fees just because he or she is familiar with the lingo — a form of jurisprudential featherbedding.
One step further:
It’s 2008. Isn’t it about time to ditch those black robes? Is there a reason why judges from the Supreme Court, to the guy who adjudicates parking tickets in a two-redlight town have to swathe themselves in black robes? Is there a reason legal business cannot be conducted in courtrooms by men and women in regular business attire? I am as fond of tradition and custom as the next guy, but those black robes are just weird. They make you think of the judges holding candles and humming as they stand around an open grave on a moonlit night.
Requiring someone to stand before a figure in a black robe to obtain justice is the opposite of user-friendly.
Williams succeeded in putting a human face on the often impersonal justice system.
Detractors interpret his efforts to engage the public as grandstanding and showboating — the most dangerous place to be in Rhode Island is between Frank Williams and a TV camera, and all that. But perhaps that is only because we haven’t seen judges do that often enough up until now. They all should have been doing a lot more of that all along, and they should do more now. Judges are not Delphic oracles passing down infallible revelations. A judge, as the old joke goes, is just a lawyer who sucked up to a politician.
That it is being done now is to Williams’ lasting credit. I don’t understand people who think judicial transparency and accountability are bad ideas.
Maybe Williams does have an industrial-strength ego, but a big ego  can be justified (within reason) when you are good at what you do, which Williams is; it is when mediocre people have big egos that it really becomes annoying.
In part because of his reform agenda, and his success in achieving much of it, and in part because he is the first chief justice to be chosen through the merit selection process, rather than be elected by the General Assembly sitting as a Grand Committee (the Senate and House meeting as one body), the Williams court will be seen as a sea-change, taking the Rhode Island court system in a new and different direction.
My guess is that we haven’t seen the last of Chief Justice Williams. I’m sure he will be keeping himself busy with Lincolnalia, with Honest Abe’s bicentennial coming up soon. But once that is over, he is going to be looking for an outlet for his talents, his passions, his intelligence and curiosity.