DSM Lawyer is an attorney in central Iowa.

When will we stop politicizing the judiciary? I practice in Polk County District Court Associate Judge Rachael Seymour’s courtroom all the time and have thoughts about why she received low marks in the Iowa State Bar Association’s judicial performance review.

Yes, hearings in her courtroom tend not to run on time, and she can take a long time to issue a written ruling. Why? Because she’s extremely thorough when we’re in court, and she gives a complete verbal ruling while you’re there. She wants to have all the possible information before making decisions that affect families, and she takes time to review all of the written evidence as well as review her notes prior to finalizing the written ruling.

Even the Iowa Court of Appeals recently noted the thoroughness of one of her rulings. This is a good thing, because it ensures everyone has all the same information rather than relying on our own individual recollections of what happened. I generally find that if I just pad my own schedule a little there’s no issue.

Judge Seymour presides primarily over juvenile court cases, and yes, she’s really tough on parents. She truly wants to ensure families don’t continually come back into the system. If parents get their kids back in her courtroom, the likelihood things will fall apart again later is pretty low.

However, many attorneys get frustrated with her. She asks lots of questions during hearings, and she expects the professionals to all be prepared. She gets frustrated when people don’t do their jobs, and she gets frustrated when parents don’t comply with court orders—because she really wants families to reunify.

In my experience, her toughness makes my job easier. I have a pretty good idea of how she’s going to feel about the available evidence, and I can therefore adequately prepare my client for what is going to happen.

On the flip side, when your client successfully navigates the process and is reunified with their child, you have a pretty good idea that’s going to stick. Some of these bar association survey results are questionable. For instance, her knowledge and application of the law is excellent; she has the same high expectations for everyone regardless of their background, race, etc; and any personal observations made are relevant to the matter at hand. The problem is that people don’t always like what she has to say, and they don’t like how she says it.

Only 47 attorneys weighed in on her performance review out of all the attorneys in District 5C (Polk County). That’s 47 out of hundreds of attorneys, and those 47 aren’t necessarily attorneys who are actively practicing in front of Judge Seymour. There’s nothing prohibiting us from weighing in on all the judges in our district, regardless of whether we regularly practice in front of them.

There are of course attorneys who don’t like to practice in front of Judge Seymour, just like there are attorneys who don’t like to practice in front of many other judges. The other judges happened to have a much larger sampling of results.

The practice of law is a self-policing profession. Our ethical rules dictate that when we see other attorneys or judges acting unethically, we are bound by the rules to report the conduct. If a judge is behaving unethically, we already have rules in place to effectuate their removal from the bench.

There is no need for the general public, the majority of whom will never appear in front of any juvenile court judge, to weigh in on who sits on the bench. The idea of losing a judge who has issued consistent, thorough rulings for fifteen years because fewer than 30 people don’t like her is appalling.

Frankly, in a lot of ways this bar association survey reads like a popularity contest. In addition, across multiple Iowa judicial districts, the female judges are consistently ranked lower than the male judges. Perhaps the real issue here is that even attorneys are guilty of implicit bias.

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Top photo of the Polk County courthouse in Des Moines is by Nicola Patterson, available via Shutterstock.