The use of collegial judges’ chambers is a developing trend in courthouse design. A collegial chambers arrangement is where two or more judges’ chambers suites are grouped together, apart from the courtrooms, instead of the traditional arrangement with a judge’s chambers suite being adjacent to his or her courtroom and often remote from other judges’ chambers. Collegial chambers can provide space and staffing efficiencies and can help strengthen the courthouse judicial community in court planning. Let’s explore three of these benefits more closely.
Sharing Support Space and Staff Resources
Limited space and resources are concerns in today’s courthouses. Finding enough space to fit every judges’ chambers is often a challenge, especially in the traditional design of having all support functions self-contained within each chambers. In this traditional arrangement, a chambers becomes an island in and of itself.
Contrast that with the collegial layout, where all support spaces and support personnel are in a single location, typically surrounded by the individual judges’ private offices. In this arrangement, shared support functions can include conference rooms, reference libraries, copy rooms, restrooms, reception areas, and break rooms. Sharing support spaces between judges’ chambers can reduce the space for each chambers suite by nearly 30 percent.
In addition, staffing could potentially be reduced by having administrative needs fulfilled by a pool of chambers staffers.
I was recently in a courthouse that took advantage of such an arrangement. The courthouse had a floor dedicated to four courtrooms and their ancillary spaces, and a separate floor dedicated to judges’ chambers. The chambers were arranged around the perimeter of the floor in a U-formation, and the support spaces were included within the core of the floor. The U-formation allowed a portion of one exterior wall to remain without full-height walled offices to allow natural light into the support spaces. Borrowed light was also provided through transom windows along the tops of the judges’ office walls.
Sharing Courtrooms
Due to mediation, plea bargaining, and other alternative dispute resolution measures, the number of trial proceedings has dropped in recent years in relation to the number of cases filed. These changes lend support to the practice of courtroom sharing, where judges do not have one single dedicated courtroom but rather share courtrooms with other judges.
The traditional courthouse design arrangement in which a judge’s chambers is adjacent to his or her courtroom - often directly adjacent, with the judge’s entry door into the courtroom being located within the chambers - is not at all conducive to courtroom sharing.
A collegial chambers arrangement allows for any judge to easily access and use any courtroom. As a result, fewer courtrooms are needed in the courthouse to accommodate all judges.
However, the potentially longer distance between the chambers and courtrooms is one downside of this arrangement when judges need to access chambers during recesses, to conduct settlement meetings, or to deal with motions. In the example I mentioned earlier, a robing room with a desk was added for short recesses (located adjacent to the courtroom with restricted access to the courtroom and judges' elevator), and two judges’ conference rooms were shared by the four courtrooms. This arrangement also requires that an effective case management system is employed by the court.
Sharing Ideas
A third benefit of collegial chambers is that collegiality promotes collaboration among judges, and can create a stronger judicial community within a courthouse. Clustering judges’ chambers together can foster an atmosphere in which judges can share their individual expertise and experiences, and confer on important judicial matters.
Collaboration among judges in collegial chambers
Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, who has written extensively as a proponent of collegiality among judges, may have said it best in his article “The Effects of Collegiality on Judicial Decision Making” (University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 2003):
“When I speak of a collegial court, I do not mean that all judges are friends. And I do not mean that the members of the court never disagree on substantive issues. That would not be collegiality, but homogeneity or conformity, which would make for a decidedly unhealthy judiciary. Instead, what I mean is that judges have a common interest, as members of the judiciary, in getting the law right.”
Put Sharing Resources and Ideas to your Court’s Advantage
Can a collegial chambers arrangement benefit your courthouse? Applied to the right situations and executed in a well-planned manner, a collegial layout can be an effective means of efficiently using courthouse resources, aiding in the application of courtroom sharing policies, and fostering collaboration. This flexible and dynamic design choice may offer more benefits than first meets the eye.
