Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice speaks in Washington

The Chief Justice of the Iowa Supreme Court spoke at a number of gatherings in Washington Thursday. Chief Justice Mark Cady addressed the Washington Rotary Club at noon before speaking at the Washington County Courthouse and finally at the Washington Free Public Library.

Cady was appointed to the Iowa Supreme Court in 1998. He became the Chief Justice of the court on Jan. 1 of this year after the former Chief Justice, Marsha Ternus, lost a retention vote in November 2010.

Cady began his talk at the library by stressing the need to reintroduce civics classes to Iowa?s classrooms. He cited a study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which graded the 50 states on the quality of their civics education. Iowa received an ?F.?

?If we are going to be a fully informed society and enter into the discourse that moves our country in one way or the other, we need to be fully informed,? said Cady. ?Civics is something I had when I went to high school but our kids are not getting it today.?

Cady reviewed what he believed to be the essential components of a judicial system.

?If we were to construct a court this afternoon, what would you want on that court system?? he asked the audience. ?We want a court system that is going to be fair, impartial and independent enough so that it can stand up to other forces that might want to move it one way or another. We want a court system that adheres to the constitutional principles on which this state was founded.?

Cady said that Iowa?s courts measure up very well against other states? courts on those metrics.

?Every year, the United States Chamber of Commerce ranks the court systems in all 50 states,? began Cady. ?Iowa ranks No. 5 in the country. We are rated the third best in terms of fairness, and the fourth best in terms of impartiality.?

?What about our Supreme Court ? a Supreme Court that has been under immense attacks over the last nine months?? continued Cady. ?A group of professors from the University of California at Davis conducted a study to determine the most influential state Supreme Court. They went through all the cases and identified the number of times a state from one jurisdiction would use a case from the Iowa Supreme Court in deciding their case. We ranked fourth in the country. That is the court system that Iowans have today.?

Cady said the secret to Iowa?s success on these rankings is that its justices are determined via merit selection as opposed to direct election. He remarked that the four worst state courts in the country, according to the Chamber of Commerce?s rankings, all elect their judges. Cady said the trouble with states that elect their judges is that the judges have to raise large sums of money to be competitive.

?Where are they going to get their money?? asked Cady. ?Lawyers will give them money. They?re going to go to businesses. Businesses might have an interest in the courts. They might want to influence the courts by giving money. The question we have to ask ourselves as Iowans is do we want our judges receiving millions of dollars from people to keep their job? We all understand what eventually seeps into a system where people provide the funds for judges to stay in office. Those judges become beholden to the people who provide the money to them.?

Cady spoke about the 2009 case Varnum v. Brien, which overturned the state?s ban on same-sex marriage. Cady wrote the unanimous opinion in that case.

?I studied that case as hard as I?ve ever studied anything in my life,? said Cady. ?Never once before the oral arguments did I discuss with the other members of the court my feelings about that case, because my feelings were essentially irrelevant.?

Cady said that it ?spoke volumes? about the evidence in the case that the seven justices voted unanimously.

?When all is said and done, that decision will stand as tall in Iowa as any decision the Iowa Supreme Court has ever made, only because it was decided the same way we have always decided a case,? said Cady.