AUGUSTA – Maine’s juvenile justice system is comparable to a term used in Italian cooking – insaporire – suggesting a blending of ingredients to create a new flavor, a Supreme Judicial Court judge said Friday during a statewide conference on legal issues affecting youth.

The state’s professionals in various fields can work together to form a unique approach to those legal issues faced by Maine’s children, Maine Supreme Judicial Court Justice Jon D. Levy suggested at the close of the conference.

“By bringing your different disciplines together to bear on this great challenge,” Levy said, “you create insaporire – a new, distinct, flavor born from patience, persistence and reverence. An outcome that is greater and different than the sum of its individual ingredients.”

The day-long program, “Youth Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Prevention and Intervention,” looked at those various ingredients involved in the legal issues of young people.

The conference drew about 300 school officials, attorneys, law enforcement officers, mental health providers, probation officers and others who interact with children to the Augusta Civic Center.

Topics ranged from bullying and school violence to how a case moves through the juvenile courts to securing mental health services and protecting the rights of children since the merger of two former state agencies to create the Department of Health and Human Services.

“The law is very protective of children,” Alison Beyea, project coordinator of Kids Legal Aid of Maine and the conference organizer, said during a break between programs. “Our goal is to remind people about the law.”

On paper, the program appeared to be a mishmash of unrelated programs offering a variety of approaches to dealing with issues that often wind up being addressed in Maine’s juvenile courts.

Levy, who as a district court judge helped reform the state’s family court system which includes juvenile courts, tied it all together with his cooking analogy and a nod to a former U.S. Supreme Court justice.

“In Italian, the word insaporire describes an aesthetic that is unique to Italian cuisine,” Levy said in wrapping up the event. “There is no English equivalent. Insaporire is derived from the Italian word sapore, which means to taste.

“Insaporire is the idea of cooking in such a way as to draw the flavor out of every individual ingredient,” he continued, “and using it to create not a blend, but rather a new individual and beautiful flavor. To do this requires patience, persistence and a reverence for the character of each of the individual ingredients.”

Justice Louis Brandeis, appointed to the nation’s highest court by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, was the person most responsible for viewing the development of the law as the product of research, insights and the experience of various disciplines rather than pure logic, the Maine justice said.

“These two ideas – courageous and innovative thinking at the state level, and a legal structure that guides by the light of reason,” Levy said, quoting Brandeis, “help explain why in Maine, today, we are embarked on the quest for the right mix of research, policy and resources, to do the right thing for kids in crisis.

Galan Williamson is one of the people whose job it is to find the right “ingredients” or services that might keep a juvenile offender from becoming a habitual one as an adult.

The juvenile resource coordinator for the five northernmost counties, Williamson consults with police, district attorneys’ offices, defense attorneys, schools, mental health providers, courts and, most importantly, families to see that support services are in place before juvenile offenders’ are sentenced before a district court judge.

“On a day-to-day basis, I work to find the most appropriate resources to help kids,” he said Friday.

Maine now has one of the lowest re-offender rates for juveniles in the country, Williamson said, because of its holistic approach that administers treatment along with justice.