Santa Clara County Bar Association 2009 Judicial Evaluation Survey Results

Introduction

The following pages report the results of the Santa Clara County Bar Association's 2009 Judicial Evaluation Survey. The purpose of the Survey was to solicit the County's practicing attorneys' opinions on the performance of the United States District Court, federal magistrates, Bankruptcy, and Superior Court judges and commissioners sitting in Santa Clara County. The 2009 Judicial Evaluation Survey was made available electronically to all members of the SCCBA and those non-members who responded to a pre-survey questionnaire indicating their interest in participating in the Survey. In addition, the Public Defender's Office, the District Attorney's Office, the City Attorney's Office and County Counsel's Office all encouraged their respective attorneys to participate in the Survey.

The Survey respondents were instructed to complete the Survey only for those judges before whom they appeared during the past four years. To gain access to the Survey instrument itself, users were required to answer the question: "Have you appeared in a Santa Clara County court during the past four years?" If the response was "yes", the user was able to access the Survey ratings. If the user responded "no," the user was prevented from accessing the Survey. The respondents were also asked several background questions in order to provide a profile of the respondents to the Survey.

Respondents who gave a rating of "Unsatisfactory" or "Needs Improvement" were required to select from list of specified reasons in order for the negative rating to be counted. These reasons are provided confidentially to each individual judge.

The results of the SCCBA 2009 Judicial Evaluation Survey will be used to inform and educate the members of the Bar Association, the Public, and the judges about how the judges' performances are perceived by practicing attorneys.

Proper Use of the Judicial Ratings

The Survey was designed to measure attorney's perceptions of the strengths and weaknesses of a judge in an evaluation category compared to that same judge in another evaluation category. Any other use of the ratings, including comparisons between judges on evaluation categories or overall, are inappropriate and constitute a misuse of the results.

A valid comparison between judges cannot be made from the Survey results for the following reasons:

• Differences between attorneys completing the ratings--In order to make valid comparisons between judges on an evaluation category, the same attorneys would have to rate each judge on those categories. Any difference in ratings could then be reliably attributed to a difference in judges, as opposed to a difference in the attorneys completing the ratings. Since the same attorneys do not appear before all judges, differences between attorneys are confounded with differences between judges in these results.
• Differences between the interpretations of evaluation categories -- The definitions of the evaluation categories were written so as to broadly apply to judges in all courts. However, the specific interpretation of the categories will vary widely among different types of courtrooms. For example, the meaning of "dispute resolution skills" and the type of task to which it applies is different for a judge presiding in a criminal trial compared to one presiding in a civil trial.
• Differences in sample sizes -- The number of respondents who rated each judge varies widely between the judges and varies between evaluation categories for a particular judge. Because of this, the statistical interpretation of the meaning of a given percentage is different for each judge. Small differences between percentages are more meaningful in a larger sample size than in a smaller sample size. It is thus statistically inappropriate to make comparisons of percentages between judges. 

View the survey results.