By Miriam Geronimus '12

New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Stuart Rabner spoke about the effects of the Great Recession on New Jersey's judicial system in a public talk on March 3. Rabner said that the justice system can help alleviate the suffering of residents, though he added that layoffs make this task trickier.

Rabner, a 1982 graduate of the Woodrow Wilson School, gave the School’s annual John Marshall Harlan ’20 Lecture in Robertson Hall.

Rabner explained that a statewide mandatory mediation program was implemented in response to the staggering increase in the number of contested foreclosure cases. In the past year, the number of foreclosure cases has tripled with nearly five thousand cases being filed per month, he said. Now, judges require a mediation session before a foreclosure case can come to court.

  “The goal is to get borrowers and lenders to sit together at a table to try to work through the problem that exists in their contractual relationship and see if we can stave off foreclosures,” Rabner said. “The role of the court system is to ensure that there is a neutral forum where individual rights of both sides are respected and protected.”

Over 800 lawyers agreed to volunteer as mediators within two months of the project’s start. To date, more than 5200 mediations have been scheduled, and over 1000 cases have been settled short of foreclosure.

Though Rabner saw this as a triumph of the judicial system, he nonetheless expressed concern that, due to layoffs, the courts would not be able to continue providing the services they are responsible for.

“The great worry as we look at this year and the years to follow, with a nine to eleven billion dollar deficit that you read about in the newspapers – I worry that the court cannot afford to continue losing hundreds of employees each year and provide the services that are essential,” Rabner said. “The complainant of a domestic violence matter can’t be told, ‘Come back next week when we have more resources and you can get you a restraining order then.’ ”

The judiciary has lost 70 million dollars in state funding over the past two fiscal years. With an annual average budget of 60 million dollars, that is a significant amount. Nearly 90 percent of that funding pays for the salaries of the 9,000 state employees of the New Jersey court system, including probation officers, judges and court clerks.   Over the past two years, 407 staff members have been laid off. While Rabner thinks the court system has fared well so far, he worried about the possible long-term consequences if such large layoffs continued in coming years.

Rabner also noted that the judiciary has had to defer computer expenses and limit spending on technology due to the recession.

“This is the opposite direction of where we need to go,” he said. “We need to make sure technology comes into the courts in New Jersey much more than it has to date.” Rabner said lawyers should be able to access case files or judges’ decisions and file their briefings online.

“That’s how the next generation of lawyers will be practicing, and we need assistance to be able to fund that upfront, which will lead to tremendous savings on the back end,” he said.

Rabner also discussed more generally the role of state supreme courts. In comparison to the U.S. Supreme Court, Rabner said that state supreme courts have a greater responsibility toward their residents.

“When the U.S. Supreme Court makes a decision, it is binding for all of the states, but that sets the floor. That does not set the ceiling,” he said.   “The state courts may, and often should, set a higher level for protection of individual liberties.”

Rabner emphasized the important role courts play not only in maintaining justice, but also in empowering residents to protect their own rights.

“People come to our courts to seek justice. They come when they believe they have suffered a wrong, that their rights have been violated and they are seeking vindication of that problem,” he said. “When they enter the court system, they’re entitled to a careful, thoughtful, and prompt review of the claims that they have presented. They’re also entitled to an honest, impartial, and wise decision that attempts to address those issues – one that rests solely on the facts and law before the judge or justice, that doesn’t in any way look at the background of the individual.”

Though Rabner acknowledged that some people would inevitably disagree with a court’s decision, he stressed that the courts should seem fair to everyone.

“While litigates have every right to walk out of our courts thinking that the decision reached was not the right one—and sometimes as many as fifty percent do—we hope that when they walk out, they believe they that they have been treated by a process that handled the matter fairly, and that they have been a participant in a process that was designed to apply that justice fairly,” he said. “That is the benchmark for any constitutional judicial system today, sixty years ago, two hundred years ago, and it is the measure that we strive for in each case in each one of our courts every single day.”