James M. Redwine

Education

Judicial Isolation

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This week starts the seven-week online course for Special & Ethical Considerations for the Rural Court Judge sponsored by the National Judicial College (six weeks online meetings with one week break in the middle). As a member of the NJC faculty, I have helped teach this course for fifteen years. The other faculty members are judges from Nevada, Mississippi, Tennessee and California. The student judges preside in rural trial courts in several states. We meet via Zoom. Our first week’s session will concentrate on the topic of Judicial Isolation involving rural court judges. The lead faculty member is Judge Pat Lenzi from Nevada.

Judges who serve in smaller jurisdictions often find themselves with the warmth of law books as their main colleagues. Due to the ethical restrictions on judges to not discuss legal matters, judges who serve in sparse areas with few other judges often find themselves with no one to help them test many important decisions before peoples’ lives are dramatically affected.

As a judge for more than forty years in a rural court environment that had only two judges, I know the need for unbiased, informed, non-partisan input in many vital decisions. Of course, it is not just judges who can benefit from sage, well intentioned consultation. Many of the techniques for dealing with judicial isolation can be applied to help non-judges make better choices in life. As most couples come to realize, when their relationships hit rough spots, it is often because the parties do not make the effort to communicate; they isolate themselves and their partners. What often follows are misunderstandings that can lead to unintended bad consequences.

So the first suggestion to deal with isolation that may lead to bad decisions is for us to set aside our pride and reach out to others, especially to others who have our best interests at heart. With Rural Court Judges that might be a fellow rural court judge in our own or a nearby jurisdiction. With non-judges it might be a neighbor, a clergyman or work acquaintance.

Another help can be involvement in judicial associations or continuing judicial education meetings, for example, participation in NJC courses or civic clubs, such as Rotary, the Elks, BPW and numerous other service groups. Such work helps us break out of our isolation and, also, can do a lot of good for our local society without requiring the exchange of intimacy or the discomfort of too much closeness. We can set our own limits and honor those of others while forging lines of open communication when desired.

Society needs its Rural Court Judges to maintain independence so that a judge’s decisions are respected. It also needs judges who are integrated into their rural jurisdictions. This delicate balance may be difficult to achieve. But rural court judges do have practices and procedures they can implement and follow. The same is true for all non-judges.

We often fail to maintain that perfect balance between isolation and involvement. However, just as all other legal education, with study and practice, our Rural Court Judges will be able to have their decisions respected while they positively participate in their communities.

Honor

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Gentle Reader, I was recently invited to address a group of high school honor students. I prepared the following remarks and hope they and you find them worthy of your interest. The theme given for the ceremony for the honor students was, “Write your own story”.  I designed my remarks around that theme.

HONOR

“Honor Students, as you write your life’s story you really only need to keep in mind a few elemental rules.

First, remember you are fortunate to have your American birthright to always guide you. When our son, Jim, first went to the old Soviet Union in 1992 he found complete strangers would pick him and his fellow Americans out and ask them if they were Americans. Jim decided the Americans stood out because they were the ones always smiling.

Then, when I taught judges in Kiev, Ukraine and Volgograd, Russia and the country of Georgia that had once been in the Soviet Union, people would stop my wife, Peg, and me on the street and ask us about America. We simply stood out from those around us. The reason was we were happy and smiling, but most of the natives were dour and stern. What we decided was that we were happy because we Americans had options; our freedom of choice was the difference.

So, Honor Students, as you write your life’s story never lose sight of the essence of being an American, that is your freedom to choose your own path. Of course, your freedom of choice has always been part of your lives. You have learned it at home and in school.

While I learned countless lessons of immense value in high school, I will share just three with you. The first involved the United States Constitution. Now you might think someone who had been to several colleges and even law school might know the Constitution through those schools. However, my most indelible lesson in the U.S. Constitution came from my high school American history teacher.

One cold autumn day our teacher came to class without his regular plaid sport coat. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a flowery tie. He asked us in the class, “Why do I have the right to wear this short-sleeved shirt?” Naturally, none of us had a clue. He called on me, “Redwine! You should know the answer. The 2nd Amendment, you know, the right to bare/bear arms”. And I never forgot the 2nd Amendment after that.

Then there was our principal who taught me a lesson in sentencing. As a judge for more than 40 years I have been called on to devise many sentences that are fair, follow the law and do good, not harm.

I have many times remembered the wisdom of my high school principal who devised a “sentence” that perfectly fit the crime, that is, the football players including me who got into an out-of-control snowball fight during a lunch hour.

Our principal had us line up outside his office and ordered us not to move or talk while we waited for him to deal with us one by one. We stood in line dreading our punishment for 2 hours until he came out of his office and said, “Alright boys, no more brawls, now go to practice”. I have often thought back on this fair and imaginative “sentence” when I have had to make a sentence comply with the law but show mercy too.

Another lesson that helped guide me through several difficult sociological dilemmas involving the fair and equal treatment of people who came before me in court, was taught to me by my two high school football coaches when we played a game against another high school in a nearby town.

After the game our coaches put us on the bus and we drove to a restaurant in that downtown. Now, I realize to you Honor Students today, segregation is like something from a foreign country and a by-gone age. I assure you it was real.

I did not go to school with African American kids until after Brown vs. The Topeka, Kansas Board of Education in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court declared “separate but equal” in U.S. education may have been separate, but it was not equal and it was unconstitutional even though it was written to be the law.

My high school integrated my freshman year in 1957 and we had 3 black players, called coloreds back then, on our football team. So, when we stopped at that restaurant after the game our whole team went in, but the restaurant owner refused to serve our black players. Our coaches said, “If you won’t serve our whole team, none of us will stay”. So, we all returned to the bus.

This lesson in choosing the harder right over the easier wrong made a life-time impression on me as to what choices really matter. This experience made a better judge, and better person of me. It also helped me to recognize the major difference between American judges and the many foreign judges I have observed and taught. Foreign judges often refuse to devise a way around an unjust written law, but American judges will choose the harder right over the easier wrong and apply a legally acceptable but fair alternative to a tough case.

So, Honor Students, please write your own story knowing you have the right to choose where you go and what you do, what you believe and what you find invalid.

As Professor Joseph Campbell who taught at Sarah Lawrence College said, there is only one unpardonable sin, “To be unaware”. Therefore, pay attention as you write your story, do not let your life pass you by.

Also, Socrates told the Honor Students of Athens 2,500 years ago, “The unexamined life is not worth living”. In other words, be curious, challenge the status quo. As Alexander Pope cautioned in his poem, A Little Learning, “Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring”. That is, do not be fooled by too little knowledge or those who espouse it.

The poet Robert Frost advised us to take the road less traveled, or as that great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.

Honor Students, remember the sage advice of your mothers and “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all”.

And most importantly, as you write your own story, always “Choose the harder right over the easier wrong” and your life story will have a happy ending! If you follow these guideposts, I predict each of your life’s stories will be of great satisfaction to you and of great benefit to everyone else.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said in his poem, A Psalm of Life, “Lives of great [people] all remind us, we can make our lives sublime and departing leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time”.

Honor Students, write your own story your own way and keep smiling!”

The Foundation

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I received my early secular schooling from the public schools in Pawhuska, Osage County, Oklahoma. My religious education was received from my family and the preachers and Sunday School teachers at the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Pawhuska. There was a great deal of osmotic transfer in both directions, but my church never seeped into issues of government and my schools never wandered into matters of faith.

My favorite Sunday School teacher was Violet Willis who, as a child, had been taken from her Osage tribal home and indoctrinated into Christianity at the government school at Chilocco. My favorite high school American History teacher was Mike Burton who never let questions of historical fact be conflated with matters of religious faith.

My foundations of faith and fact were scrupulously kept separate by the responsible adults, both secular and sectarian. Science prevailed in public school classrooms and lessons of morality were the focus at home and church. Never did I hear nor see any religious material or teaching at school; that was the province of the clergy.

At school I did receive twelve years of education in the history and foundations of America. I learned that our Founders rebelled against religious tyranny and monarchial rule. The separation of our three equal branches of government and especially the separation of religion and government were the clarion call of our republican form of democracy. Although we had to be ever vigilant to keep faith from seeking to control fact.

Such issues as the Salem Witch Trials, the Scopes Monkey Trial and efforts to slip or demand the instillation of a particular doctrine into public curriculum are constant danger signs that our democracy is fragile. Our Founders feared religious intoleration or practice. The very first of our United States Bill of Rights demands: 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

And to their credit, those Founders of Oklahoma’s Constitution provided in Article II of Oklahoma’s Bill of Rights:

“Public money or property–use for sectarian purposes. No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister or other religious teacher or dignitary or sectarian institution as such.”

No god of any religion is mentioned in the U.S. Constitution and neither the Bible nor the Ten Commandments had any place in our Founders’ careful crafting of our form of government. If our public schools are to post and teach our history, they should post the Bill of Rights and explain to America’s students how our country has managed to survive as a democracy for well over 200 years because it has avoided allowing any religion to control our future leaders.

Perhaps, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Education, Ryan Walters, who on June 27, 2024 during a meeting of the State Board of Education called for the mandatory teaching of the Bible and the posting of the Ten Commandments in every fifth through twelfth grade public-school classroom in Oklahoma, was confused. The Oklahoma law that in 2012 established his position (70 O.S. 2011, §3-107) defines the powers and duties of the elected State Superintendent:

“Upon proper request, the State Superintendent shall advise school district superintendents (concerning) school laws, including court decisions, Attorney General opinions and ‘other informative matter relating to the school laws as deemed appropriate.’”

The United States of America was not founded on any religion’s dogma or doctrine and, in fact, it was specifically immunized against the dangers thereof. I thank my church and school teachers for understanding that and informing me.