Cooperation With Court Colleagues

Cooperation With Court Colleagues

Rule 2.5(B) of the Model Code of Judicial Conduct requires a judge to cooperate with other judges and court officials in the administration of court business.¹ Two phrases carry the rule. Other judges and court officials names the people to whom the duty runs. Administration of court business names its subject: the managerial machinery a court shares, such as how new cases are assigned, how courtrooms and calendars are divided, how an absent colleague's matters are covered, and how staff are deployed. Rule 2.5(A), covered above, asks whether a judge performs the judge's own duties competently and diligently. Rule 2.5(B) looks outward. It asks what a judge owes the colleagues and officials whose work depends on the judge's participation in those shared arrangements.

A court is a shared institution, and that fact explains the rule. Judges on one court draw on the same courtrooms, the same clerks and staff, and a single docket divided among them by rotation or assignment. Because resources and caseload are shared, one judge's administrative choices change what colleagues must do. A judge who refuses assigned cases leaves them on someone else's calendar. A judge who will not cover for an absent colleague leaves hearings unheld or forces the remaining judges to stretch. The burden falls twice: first on the colleagues who absorb the work, then on the litigants whose cases wait. The duty to cooperate denies a judge the option of treating a judgeship as a separate office, free to opt out of the arrangements that make the whole court function.

An earlier version of the Code expressed the same idea in its canon on administrative responsibilities. It told a judge to discharge administrative responsibilities diligently, to maintain professional competence in judicial administration, and to facilitate the performance of the administrative responsibilities of other judges and court officials.² The first two clauses correspond to the competence and diligence that Rule 2.5(A) now demands, and the third anticipates the cooperation duty. The verb facilitate shows the duty's active side: a judge must make colleagues' and officials' administrative work easier to perform, not merely stay out of the way.

Exam questions usually test the limits of the duty, because a fact pattern can make a judge look uncooperative when the judge has done nothing wrong. Begin with the clear violation.

Disagreement alone does not produce that result.

The two judges may be equally unhappy with how the court is run. What separates them is the effect of their conduct on the court's business. The first judge's refusal moved work onto colleagues and delayed litigants, which is the harm the duty exists to prevent. The second judge's objection moved nothing. The duty asks a judge to keep doing the shared work while an objection is heard; it does not demand silence or agreement.

A third situation involves a judge who sends a case away for a legitimate reason.

The cooperation duty cannot override the rules that keep a conflicted judge off a case. A judge who sat in order to spare colleagues the extra work would trade the parties' right to an impartial decision-maker for administrative convenience. The protection covers good-faith recusal only. A judge who invokes impartiality as a pretext for avoiding an unwelcome assignment stands where the first judge stood.

The text confines the duty to the administration of court business, and that confinement matters most at the border with adjudication. Assigning cases, setting schedules, and arranging coverage are administrative arrangements, and cooperating with them does not require a judge to adopt a colleague's view of how a case should come out. A judge who reaches a different result from a colleague on the same legal question, or who resists pressure to decide a pending matter in a particular way, has not failed to cooperate. If the duty reached the merits, administrative authority could operate as pressure on decisions, and a judge's independence would depend on the goodwill of whoever controls the calendar. Teamwork in administration and independence in adjudication belong to different spheres, and Rule 2.5(B) governs only the first.