Indiana legislators both added and eliminated courts in the recent legislative session. (Getty Images)
We are living in interesting times. Maybe you’ve noticed. And I’m not just talking about the vehicles in the Statehouse parking lot, or the hot history takes on social media. Hopefully, you’ve also detected the great reshuffling of priorities taking place right before our eyes.
Less money from the federal government and pervasive economic uncertainty are wreaking havoc on the state budget. Property tax relief is putting pressure on local governments to find new revenue or reduce services. And Medicaid growth is forcing smokers to pay more for their already expensive habit.
The shakeup has even come to a courtroom near you. Under the recently passed HEA 1144, some locales, notably the ever-expanding Hamilton County, will get new judicial officers. Others, like the demographically challenged Blackford County, will see theirs taken away.
All this rebalancing shows policymakers engaged in the perennial contest between trade-offs and solutions.
Thomas Sowell described the history of this contest in his classic A Conflict of Visions. According to Sowell, optimizing trade-offs is the mission of those who operate under what he terms the constrained vision of human nature, which sees us all irredeemably imperfect and lacking the capacity for solutions. The yin to this yang is Sowell’s unconstrained vision, which sees humankind as perfectible and its challenges as ultimately solvable.
HEA 1144 shows the constrained view ascendant. Lawmakers like Rep. Chris Jeter and Sen. Liz Brown recognize it is unsustainable to continually add courts without examining the system in its entirety. We can’t materialize judicial officers from thin air. So, when judges in overworked counties ask for more resources, it makes sense for lawmakers to find a way to pay for it. The simple trade-off is to cut underutilized courts.
But the unconstrained vision should not be ignored. It is indisputably a world of finite resources. There is only so much time, so much money, and so much energy to go around. And yet, over tens of thousands of years, our species has demonstrated an
uncanny ability to expand the realm of the possible. Lives have been lengthened, wealth has been created, and new sources of power have been tapped.
In the fullness of time and imagination, there may be solutions after all.
The judicial utilization problem perfectly illustrates a policy challenge that would benefit from both the constrained and unconstrained views. According to the 2024 Weighted Caseload Measures, the judiciary is operating at 102% capacity, meaning we collectively have almost exactly the right number of judges we need. It’s just that some courts are overloaded while others are underused. The simple solution is to put the underused courts to work.
I’m guessing the put-the-judges-to-work solution looks a lot better to most Hoosiers than the eliminate-the-judges-in-my-county trade-off. And fortunately, we have a model that will allow us to actively pursue the solution without settling for the trade-off.
Historically, judges “rode circuit,” traveling on horseback from town to town to hear cases. This allowed sparsely populated areas to pool their resources and create a justice system they couldn’t otherwise afford in their small frontier communities. A
vestige of this system survives in Indiana to this day: our smallest community, Ohio County, shares a circuit court with its much larger neighbor, Dearborn County.
Share and share alike
In our more urbanized society, the design problem is different, but the circuit court solution is still relevant. Today, it’s not about pooling resources but about projecting resources where they’re needed. Still, sharing what we have is the solution.
The Supreme Court has already divided the state into 26 administrative districts. With small rule changes, the judges in these districts could be allowed to hear cases across county lines. No horses required. Instead, through the magic of Zoom and the miracle of electronic filing, our existing judicial officers can do the work in their existing chambers.
In the end, Sowell’s dichotomy is a brilliant way to think about the ongoing battle of ideas, but, as he admits, not everyone has chosen a side. So, it is odd that it has become something of a mantra to say that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Let’s
wait before we carve that in stone. Certainly, we are constrained, but we are not stagnant. Most importantly, we are not doomed to false choices.
For this reason, and with all due respect to Sowell, I prefer another classic work on trade-offs and solutions: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. When confronted with a scenario designed to guarantee failure, Kirk famously changed the conditions of the
test. Spock sacrificed himself for the benefit of his crew. They both rejected the no-win scenario. So should we.
Judging from recent comments, legislators may be on the same page. In his remarks on final passage of HEA 1144, Rep. Jeter acknowledged that there would be an ongoing effort to get our judges “in the right spots.” If that effort comes to fruition, and if
lawmakers change the conditions to make that possible, they may be more unconstrained than they think. They may be ready to boldly seek out new solutions like those that worked before.
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