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THE CHAIRMAN: Amendment No. 7,
having been seconded, the Chair recognizes
Delegate Bamberger to speak to the amend-
ment.
DELEGATE BAMBERGER: Mr. Chair-
man, section 5.08 provides that the legisla-
ture will set a number of judges who are
in the superior court, and will allocate
them among the counties. The sense of this
amendment proposes to strike that sen-
tence which says that in allocating the
superior court judges the General As-
sembly must have a judge in each county.
If you will recall when the Chairman of
the Committee spoke in presenting his re-
port, I understood him to say that that
meant that every county would have a
superior court judge who resided and made
his home there; and that also it meant that
there would be a superior court sitting in
every county.
That seems to me to be untidy judicial
housekeeping. The fact of the matter is
that there is not now enough judicial busi-
ness in every county in this State to oc-
cupy a judge fulltime.
The committee report quite well proposes
to attend to that by providing for the
power to assign judges, for example, the
judge in Worcester County when he is not
busy, even though it may be in the hunting
season, to Baltimore County or Baltimore
City, where the business of the court is
more pressing and there are not enough
judges to attend to the business.
But I suggest that requiring the appoint-
ment of a judge from every county very
much restricts the ability of this State in
some instances to get the best lawyers to
serve on the bench. I must say that I in-
tend to support as strongly as I can those
provisions of this report which deal with
the selection and the tenure of the judges,
but in some counties there are very few
lawyers. In Garrett County, I am informed,
there are only six lawyers, which means the
job of that nominating commission will be
very difficult, considerably restricted, if
in selecting a judge for the superior court
in Garrett County there are only six
lawyers to whom they may speak, although
as a matter of fact because there may not
be enough judicial business in Garrett
County to occupy that judge all of the
year he will be assigned to sit in other
counties.
I should point out now that if this
amendment is adopted it will require a
further amendment in section 5.13, which
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provides that to be eligible for appoint-
ment to the superior court the judge must
be a resident of the county where that
particular superior court vacancy exists.
If this amendment is adopted I would
suggest that that could be amended by
providing that the person must be a resi-
dent of the appellate circuit. The State will
be divided into seven appellate circuits.
That would mean that in the Eastern Shore
the judge who sat in that county some of
the time and some other county some of the
time would come from that area of the
State.
The purpose of the amendment is to
strengthen the hands of the nominating
commission in selecting judges, not to im-
pose upon it and upon the legislature a
requirement that a judge must live in a
particular county, to compel them to go to
a very small bar, as I say in Garrett
County, to pick a judge among six lawyers
and a judge, moreover, who probably will
not sit very often in that county because
the business of the courts will not keep
him there, and under the other provisions
of this article, can be assigned to sit in
another county in another court.
THE CHAIRMAN: Does any delegate
desire to speak in opposition to the amend-
ment? Delegate Grant.
DELEGATE GRANT: I am one of the
six lawyers. Mr. Bamberger never intends
to practice law there.
We started back in 1894 to try to get a
judge up in Garrett County. They finally
decided to increase the membership of the
Allegany Bar, we were in the same circuit,
with two more judges. One judge faith-
fully promised he would come to our county
every Monday to take care of our business.
As I recall the story, in July of 1895 or
something like that, he came up the first
Monday and he never came up again.
(Laughter.)
It is a very serious matter actually to
do business in an area like this where you
are so far from the judge. We finally did
gst our own judge up there in 1958 and the
practice of law has been tremendously im-
proved. I am quite sure if we lost a judge
we would probably be unable to hold six
lawyers. If one needed an order signed, it
was a two and a half hour trip to Cumber-
land through the snow if you could get
through, to get any order or small piece of
business taken care of. We used to pass it
around and have one lawyer gather up all
petitions and take them down. It is a
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