Judges Jump Ship In Growing Numbers

I am worrying over the recent, trickling exodus from the bench to the bar. In recent months came news that three more of Connecticut’s best judges — Judge Robert Holzberg, Judge Jonathan Silbert and retiring Supreme Court Justice Ian McLachlan — have decided to depart for the greener pastures of private practice. The path taken by those stellar jurists is an increasingly well-worn one of late, as several other excellent judges have decided that private ADR work trumps the daily courtroom grind. And so, the new gospel according to Connecticut seems to be: Judge not.

More than a century ago, James Bryce devoted an entire chapter of his book The American Commonwealth to why the best men did not go into politics in America. (By “the best,” it should be noted, Bryce, a viscount, really meant the well-born, but his aristocratic prejudices are not the point.) This is a good time for the Connecticut legal community to ask a slightly-altered version of Bryce’s question: Why are so many of our best people leaving the bench?