Number of cases worries Saufley Workload seen to impair quality

AUGUSTA – In her first months on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court, Leigh Saufley confronted what she came to call an “untenable workload.”

The justice found serving on the court fascinating, but she was “working more hours now than I ever did before.”

In 20 years, she said, the number of cases receiving review by the court had increased by 138 percent. She wondered “why I couldn’t seem to keep up without giving up enormous chunks of family time.”

After analyzing caseload demands, Saufley came to a stark conclusion: “Simply put, the caseload of the court is so high that there is very little time for reflection, discussion, debate or even heated argument,” she wrote in a January 1999 article for the Maine Bar Journal.

Now that Saufley has been nominated to become chief justice, she becomes responsible in many ways for its management. If confirmed, she would assume the lead role in attempting to remedy the problems she diagnosed.

Gov. Angus King, who put Saufley on the law court in 1997, announced her nomination on Friday. The nomination will be reviewed by the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee and is subject to a Senate vote.

During his decade leading the state supreme court, then-Chief Justice Daniel Wathen made clear his own view that the seven-member appellate panel was having difficulty coping with its caseload.

Endorsing a court unification plan in December 1999, Wathen asserted that the state supreme court “has for several years operated at or beyond maximum capacity.”

Wathen resigned last month to run for governor. Saufley is the first woman put forth to head the court.

Saufley said the only benefit of the supreme court’s workload was that justices were too busy to bicker or squabble and were so dependent on one another that they were forced to work collegially.

Overall, however, she fretted about the effects of the court’s duties on the quality of its product.

“The press of business can result in equal time for issues of unequal importance, and can lead the court to inconsistent or shallow analysis,” Saufley wrote.

“It may also deprive the court,” she wrote, “of the time to look to the big picture and consider the long-range effects of the language or approaches in certain critical opinions.”

In the journal article, she warned that an overburdened court had to be aware of “the subtle pressure that may exist to concur with the assigned-writing judge” as a way to keep from getting more deeply bogged down.

She also confessed she had found “simply no time to read the transcripts in [most] cases to which I am not assigned,” despite her incoming intention to do so when factual issues, jury instructions or evidentiary rulings were in dispute.

“Although I have had to learn methods of getting more done in less time, I’m not terribly happy with the compromises that are required,” Saufley wrote.