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One thing it's done is it's been a counterbalance against the natural human tendency. When you have six judges that have been together for nine years, they tend to start thinking more like -- and tend to think today the same way they thought last year and the year before that.

I don't have to tell this committee, society is changing at a very rapid pace nowadays and the law is changing more rapidly then it used to because it has to deal with real problems in society. It is good in this day and age when you get some new blood.

Now, let me say, I think it is fortuitous, but it was also a very happy circumstance that the six original judges served together for nine years without any turnover. We needed that because the court was brand new and it needed more of that continuity than you would need later on, but it's true with any court including the Supreme Court.

You want a good deal of continuity. You don't want too much turnover, but then again you don't want too much stability either.
Q. Has the preassignment of cases effected the quality of deliberations in the Court of Appeals?
A. I anticipated that question might be asked because it was asked when there was screening for the Court of Appeals. I am respectfully going to ask that the committee not insist that I comment on that. That's an important concern of the legislature, don't misunderstand me.

Mr. Chairman, you chair another committee which would be a great committee that -- I've never been called before a legislative committee to say anything about the court system or the substantive or the procedural law, but I think it would be a great opportunity and I will tell you now, I would be quite willing if invited. I'm not volunteering for it. But if some subcommittee chairman, the appropriate one of your subcommittees wished to inquire into those kind of things, I will give you honest and forthcoming answers within the bounds of judicial ethics.

And one thing we had to do was reduce all those cases that had backed up in that system because the Supreme Court had -- couldn't handle them. You expanded the trial court system by almost doubling the number of Circuit judges by adding a whole new system, 46 Family Court judges, and then no change was made in the Supreme Court. Obviously, the Supreme Court became a bottleneck on the system.

The General Assembly saw that and wisely set up the Court of Appeals, and so originally we had to handle that work load. We sat in cases, and this is not good, but we had to do it, 12 months a year. We held a term of court every month and we were writing opinions year-round. We did that for three years and got rid of the backlog, but I can tell you that all of us were simply burned out by that time.

After that, the docket, the appellate docket, stayed pretty stable for a while and the Court of Appeals averaged around 360 dispositions a year, about 60 opinions per judge. We, unlike the Supreme Court, had to write a full opinion in every case. And so 60 opinions is gracious plenty if you want the judges to do a good job. If you want them to sort of glance at the case and pass a benediction over it, a stamp censored or whatever you're supposed to do, okay, but if you want us to hear an oral argument in the case, study the briefs and records and work on our opinions, that is plenty of work for us.

It's no secret that when you have six people who are ratcheted from about 360 cases a year up to a minimum of 600 cases a year, the work is going to change, the opinions are going to look different.

We had, for one example, to completely reorganize our staff, our legal staff. We have five staff attorneys. They have been doing one type of work in the years where we had the other case loads. If we had to keep doing that, we would be probably in a year and a half to two years behind on our docket now. We knew that we had to rethink that and it took some hard thinking, and I'll tell you that the six of us didn't agree, but we worked long enough -- and this is another advantage of all of us having been together as long as we
have. We worked on it hard and reached a consensus which everybody agreed was a practical solution, if it wasn't every judge's optimum solution.

We put that into effect. We had to -- experience is a good teacher and there were some bugs in the system for the first three months. We modified it to do that and I can tell you that it's working today and even though we only have six judges and we only sit in threes, not -- the whole court doesn't sit together like the Supreme Court. We sit in panels and we still only have five staff attorneys and we still only have one law clerk when we could use two, we're current.

I'll give you an example, so you see what I mean. We just finished our April term of court. The cases, most of the cases that we heard were cases in which the last brief in that case, the last brief in that case, was filed in February. We're hearing them in April. On the panel I presided on, we had about 30 cases for April, about 20 of those opinions are already filed. They're in the Clerk's office. We're still working on some of the others that were a little bit more difficult and you can't treat every case alike, but that's what we're able to do.

Let me say that I don't mean for the General Assembly to get complacent and say, hey, they're real current and all of this. If we have

You are, and I have confidence that you will do the best you can when you have literally hundreds of different people say, "My thing is more important than somebody else's." It's the same process as saying I'm better than some other judge.

What you should be asking is what's best for the government of South Carolina? What's best for the Supreme Court? You can never referee when you only have money for ten things and you have 50 people, you can't referee -- they're all worthy. Some are obviously more worthy than others, but it's self-defeating and it wastes a lot of time and emotional energy when we get into the mind-set the task is to decide whether A's thing is more worthy than B. They're both worthy. What we should be asking is what's best for government in South Carolina because that means what's best for the people of South Carolina.
Q. In your 1983 screening you indicated that one of the things you thought played a part in the backlog of the Court -- courts was a lack of clarity in some judicial opinion writing. Do you still think that is a contributing factor?
A. Again, I'm respectfully going to ask the committee not to demand that I answer that question. The reason is that our judicial system in the circumstances is doing the best job that I think it can. If we want to improve the system, the General Assembly, of course, has to look and decide if we need additional resources and you have all these other things to look at, too. But we don't make those decisions and it's appropriate that we shouldn't.

Another thing I will not do -- let me say this is the Supreme Court grades our papers just like we grade the trial court's papers. Sometimes I personally agree, or as a judge, agree with what they do. There are sometimes when I don't agree with what they do. And we have the same prerogative that parties do, which is after the case is over, you can go down to the tavern with your lawyer, have a drink and cuss the judge. And we get cussed plenty by our brothers on the Circuit bench. We know why they do that. They're frustrated. They're overworked. Nobody likes in public to be told that he was wrong about something.

But there are some good things looked at objectively, and it's not just my opinion. There are some good things that are being done and I tell you the Supreme Court is doing some good things, they're writing some good opinions. I'm a judge in the system, too. And there is another reason I shouldn't comment is because they are over me and whether I agree with what -- an opinion they wrote, whether I think it was clear as you suggested or not, I am bound to follow it and apply it in cases before me. And that doesn't matter if my view is a better view or not, I am bound to apply the decisions of the Supreme Court.

If I have some trouble understanding what they mean in a case, I'm bound to work harder, to study that case longer until I reach a conclusion. In fact, I'm probably then bound to read other cases they've written on the same topic and say how does this one fit, what's the overall picture, because you don't see a rule of law in one case. Sometimes you do, if they're short clear opinion, and that's it. It's like a headnote in West, and that's great when we have those kind of opinions. But sometimes you have to read a lot of opinions.

I'll give you an example, I have written what I think is recognized as the definitive opinion on something that's called breach of contract accompanied by a fraudulent act, to write that opinion, which is fairly short and fairly lean, I had to study about 25 Supreme Court cases starting back in the Depression in the thirties, or I wouldn't have understood that. Now, I should have done it because it -- there may be nothing wrong with the opinions as such, maybe it's that Randy Bell doesn't have that in his background. I never tried one of those cases. I did teach a little bit about it in the law school. And my job, in that situation, is to hit the books, understand it, ask my law clerk who is also a good lawyer, what do you think about this, go to the other judges on my panel because our decisions are judgements of the court, not of Randy Bell or Bert Goolsby or Bill Howell or Carol Connor. They're judgments of the Court. One of us has to write it as a necessity, but they are still judgments of the court and so I talk to these other people and say what do you think. I never encountered that in practice.

I didn't want those kinds of letters, so I thought about who I should ask and let me tell you before I thought of any individual, I had sort of a profile in mind and I asked myself what kind of people would the committee respect and believe because if you don't respect the person who's writing the opinion and believe them, that's not of very much value in this process.

Judge Lightsey has seen me for years. I've known him for years. We're friends, but let me say this about all of these people, I have never played a round of golf with any of them, I've never taken them up on a tennis match, I have never stayed overnight in their houses or any of that. We are professional friends and personal friends, but we're not people who see each other every day, okay, and all of these people fit in that category. I don't go hunting with any of them. Okay.

Doctor Lightsey, he's smart and you know that and you would expect since he's been president of the College of Charleston as well as dean of the Law School. He was a full-time faculty member over there and also an adjunct professor. He knew me and he's known me for a long time. Why? Because we were on the opposite sides of cases in the reapportionment litigation back in the 1970's, so he knows what I'm like when I'm against you. He also knows my ability to handle something as complex as reapportionment legislation and it's politically sensitive. He was my colleague at the law school. He knows what kind of teacher I was. He was my boss at the law school because he was dean for part of the time I was there. I left while he was still dean to go into private practice, but he knows that. He's seen how I interact in committee meetings and he knows how I taught and what the students thought of me. And he also had an unusual practice.

I said that he's one of the leading intellects of the bar, but he didn't practice in a great big defense firm. Most of his practice was Harry Lightsey, Attorney at Law, or Lightsey and one other person. You can check the record on this. I won't give you the details. But he -- and he also didn't handle a practice which could be called a plaintiff's practice or a defense practice. He dealt with a practice that largely was things like reapportionment, that is governmental affairs or regulated industries. Regulated industries is one of the most complicated and technical areas of the law. And thank goodness that there are Harry Lightseys who are interested in it because I think most of us don't care anything about it. We may care about our power bill at the end of the month, but we don't care about the law and we don't know much about it. Same with tax or patent and copyright. These are specialties. Harry practiced and taught in this area and so he's the guy who knows what it is to try a big case. I'm confident because he's such a good lawyer that when he started out as

Chief Justice George Gregory, now my policy is not to ask a sitting, active judge to say anything for me or to pick me over any other judge that's in -- up for judicial election, but Chief Justice Gregory is retired and he is not like Justice -- Chief Justice Littlejohn who's effectively the seventh judge on our court and has been for three years. He does not sit on cases. To my knowledge, he hasn't sat on a single case since he's retired, trial or appeal.

He was a trial judge for many years. He was on the Supreme Court for 17 years. He was Chief Justice of that court. I have sat on that court a number of times. He not only grades my papers when they come across the street, but I've been an acting justice on his court not once or twice, but many times. Who better would know the kinds of things that you want in a Supreme Court justice than someone like George Gregory. He's not the only one, but he's a person who would know those things. Why? Because he has the experience okay.
Q. Excuse me for interrupting you, but you have outstanding references, but one of the reasons we ask that, and we ask it of other candidates that have attorneys listed as references, are they people who would appear before the court on any kind of a regular basis?

I guess Thomas Pope would probably --
A. Okay. I'll tell you who the others are. Of course, the first three would not.
Q. Not.
A. Harry Lightsey doesn't do courtroom practice now. The fourth one is Tom Pope and I don't mean Tom Pope who was a colleague of some of the senators, but his father. He is a very senior member of the Bar. People have been looking at him as a lawyer for 50 years and don't find much to criticize about him and he does not appear in my court anymore. He has sort of a half time practice now with his age.

The final person is Johnson, W.W. Johnson. He's the CEO of NationsBank, South Carolina. He doesn't come into my court at all. He was a client of ours when I was in practice, so he knows what kind of lawyer I was and if you want to find out about the lawyer, ask his client. They are our most severe critics. Also the committee requires me to furnish a banking reference and I banked at his bank for over 15 years, so he knows if my checks bounce or things like that. And he was in a position to tell you what my credit status was and in a general way, he

Because so much of that talk had been circulated over here and I was told people would call me and say are you such and such and so and so, so and so told me this. And so I -- in the letter in which I announced to the General Assembly on January 3rd that I would seek election to the Supreme Court, I took the liberty of laying out in some detail, and we don't need to go into that detail here and probably the committee doesn't have to really know the details, the facts of the case.

I also, although you don't require it on the Personal Data Questionnaire anymore, furnished a letter from my doctor because the supporter of some judge who is running against me doesn't know what the state of my health is. My doctor does. So that's that reason that's in there. The committee members may not have read that.

I know they rely on staff to digest it, but the bottom line is that I am capable of going to work every day as a judge and sitting on cases and writing my opinions. I don't know that I need to add anything to that, but that's the reason I furnished that doctor's letter. If committee members have further questions, I'm happy to answer them.
Q. That's the information I was looking for. The area of receiving gifts from attorneys, how do you approach that?
A. I'm sorry.
Q. In the area of receiving gifts from attorneys, how do you approach that?
A. Okay. My answer and, of course, I heard you a month ago ask all the other judges these questions, so I was prepared to answer this or I anticipated that you would ask that and my basic answer to that is a short one. I play by the rules. The rules are in the Canons. They're in the Code of Laws of South Carolina. These are the people who enact those laws. I'm not -- unless you want me to, I can read the text if the

None of us are our best sometime when we're trying too hard and lawyers can be pretty obnoxious when they're trying hard, but I try to be courteous to them. I try to remember what it was like when I was a lawyer. I tried too hard, too, for my client. And I think that he wants to give each lawyer in his court a maximum chance to win his case.

Now, let me talk about that at the appellate level where I sit. That means that I have to be open-minded on that case. I've studied it and I have a tentative opinion beforehand, but I have to be open-minded, that is, when a lawyer starts making an argument, I don't hear his first few sentences and, ahh, say, there is nothing to that and tune out. I listen open-mindedly to all of his argument.

The second thing is that I know that it never helps for a judge to terrorize or humiliate a lawyer in court and I don't do it. He can't do his -- who of us sitting in this room, judge, legislator or ordinary person, does the best at what he can do well when someone is leaning on him hard, criticizing him openly in front of a jury or in our court, there are no juries, the other lawyers and whoever is in the audience, or intimidate him, so -- and that -- to me, not doing that is part of wanting to give each lawyer a maximum chance to win his case.

That's why we ask them questions, too. The questions we ask on our court are not designed to show we're smarter than the lawyer or that he doesn't know this particular citation from memory or something like that. We're asking him the questions that in our mind will give him the best chance to shore up what we think is a weakness or to improve what is his strength and we need that. Briefs tell us an awful lot about the case, but I'm a firm believer that even if you only have ten minutes to hear an oral argument, you should do it because he can talk back to you when you ask him something.

It's different for a trial judge, may I say. In a trial judge, we want -- there are no juries or witnesses or parties in our court. There are two lawyers standing up arguing, but in a trial court, you want that trial judge to be courteous to the jury, to the witnesses, to the parties. I think you

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