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With six vacancies, and one of the busiest and most complex caseloads in the country, our district court judges and magistrate judges are laboring under extraordinary pressures. Yet despite the extreme workload, we are proud to have a court that is responsible, responsive, and dedicated to the principles of justice that have made New Jersey courts (both federal and state) a leader and role model throughout the nation.

There are many qualities we look for in judging a judge and in extending praise to the overall quality of our court: fairness, competency, preparedness, respect for litigants and counsel, demeanor, lack of bias and quality of opinions are high among them. Metrics alone are not. Our judges are not production line workers or ball players, where RBIs, battings averages and widgets made per hour are fair measures of performance. Although timely resolution of litigation is certainly important, we and our clients would rather wait a bit for a well-reasoned, well-grounded and thorough opinion that deals fairly with the issues at hand and sets meaningful precedent for cases to come, than get an immediate but slipshod opinion, without oral argument, on issues of great importance to both the litigants and the public. It is unfair and contrary to the public interest to suggest otherwise.

Unfortunately, the trend seems to the contrary. We live in a world in which statistics, ratings and rankings are increasingly called upon to quantify the unquantifiable and to attack or defend. We have numerous rankings of lawyers and law firms, U.S. News and World Report rankings of law schools, lawyers and law firms, and recently an article in this paper reporting data about motions pending before members of our district court. The data is what it is, but it is just wrong for anyone to draw conclusions about the performance of judges, their work ethic or the quality of justice being rendered based on raw statistics alone.

The issue is more important than defending particular judges or courts, although we do. At a time when all of our institutions are under attack from many sides, and when our courts are prohibited from defending themselves, it is a moral imperative that we not let numbers and metrics guide our priorities. We value the fair administration of justice in continuation of the grand tradition of our supreme court, trial and appellate courts and federal bench. We value respect for litigants and consideration for lawyers. We value scholarship, forward thinking and innovation in the law. We value the opportunity to be heard in written submissions and in oral argument before a prepared and engaged judiciary. We value written opinions that fairly resolve issues, provide guidance for future actions and enhance the common law. We do not want those values sacrificed for expediency, and are opposed to any shifting of priorities that may divert our judiciary from those goals.