Golfers, amateur and professional, use video to watch and analyze their golf swing. Many judges who fancy themselves golfers do this (and even some judges who really are good golfers). But it’s the rare judge who uses video to analyze his or her performance as a judge. Yet video can be valuable here too.
A few years ago, Kevin Burke and I did an educational program for the trial judges of New Hampshire. In advance of it, six judges volunteered to be videotaped on the bench for half a day; Kevin and I then reviewed the videotapes and showed some clips to the group. Evaluation forms from the attendees indicated that they learned a lot from watching the videos and then discussing what was done well and what could be improved.
For the volunteer judges in New Hampshire, we had a follow-up assignment: each of them had to note two things they observed that they hadn’t paid enough attention to before seeing the tapes and to identify two things that could be improved in their on-the-bench performance. All of them gained useful insights from this. If you want to see what those judges learned, take a look at Appendix A to this paper (Procedural Fairness in the Courts of Utah), where I’ve set out in full the New Hampshire judges’ responses.
Doing a video self-assessment this way is not difficult. In New Hampshire, each judge advised those in attendance that a video was being made solely for judicial-training purposes, and that only the judge would be shown on the tape. The camera, set up to the side of the courtroom, was turned on and generally ran for about half a day. While the audio in such a setup is not ideal, it’s adequate for this limited purpose. And if a judge wants to go beyond self-assessment, the tape could be viewed by someone else who could give feedback—a communications professor or graduate student, another judge, the judge’s spouse, or someone else whose opinion the judge would respect.
Steve Leben
Procedural Fairness For Courts and Judges 
Leave a Reply