Chief Justice Daniel Wathen offered the Legislature many good suggestions for “faster, cheaper and fairer courts” in his annual State of the Judiciary address Tuesday.

One of the best was his suggestion that legislators spend a day in court. Good things tend to happen when lawmakers take a look for themselves. The most recent example would be the Maine Youth Center. For years, concerns festered about the dilapidated buildings, staff shortages and lack of effective rehabilitation programs for young offenders. Early last year, partly due to Justice Wathen’s urging in previous addresses, groups of legislators toured the South Portland facility and were appalled at what they saw. Now, improvements are under way.

If legislators take the chief justice’s advice this time, they’ll see a lot of good things. The Maine Bar leads the nation in the donation of legal services to the poor. A growing corps of trained volunteers provides information, assistance and advocacy. The new Family Division is doing much to remove rancor and uncertainty from the difficult process of divorce and child custody. The even newer Juvenile Drug Court promises to confront and prevent the substance abuse that is a component of an estimated 85 percent of crime in Maine.

Legislators also will see plenty of room for improvement, from relatively minor adjustments to more profound changes. They’ll see how a growing number of low and middle-income Mainers are being priced out of the market for legal services and are forced to fend for themselves. This is largely the result of the concerns lawyers understandably have about their liability exposure should they perform only specific task for a client without taking on the entire case. Justice Wathen’s recommendation that the code of professional responsibility be amended to allow the “unbundling” of legal services — if accompanied by informed consent and full disclosure — would help working people afford what, and only what, they need.

They’ll see, of course, overflowing dockets, overworked judges and court staff and jurors made grumpy by grossly insufficient compensation and an abundance of waiting around. The deficiencies in court security will be apparent and should be found unacceptable.

And if they sit through a jury trial, legislators will see reason to support one of Justice Wathen’s common-sense suggestions — the need for written jury instructions. The most confusing part of many trials comes after the evidence has been presented, the testimony heard, the arguments made, when the presiding judge explains the law in question to the jury. It is the last thing these untrained citizens doing their civic duty hear before they deliberate. Now, a judge can play it safe, merely read the statute aloud and send the jury on its way with an earful of legalese, or a judge can try to explain the law in plain English and run the risk of committing an error. Standard instructions, with the wording developed by a panel of legal experts — and perhaps approved by a panel of English teachers — would contribute greatly to fair and well-informed verdicts.

Justice Wathen opened his address by quoting the plea, often repeated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “to let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Legislators who spend a day in court will see that although Maine has a pretty good trickle going, there are a lot of practical and doable ways the flow can be increased.