Ruth McGregor has spent the past 20 years making difficult decisions, first as a Court of Appeals judge and later as the chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court.
But when McGregor came to Arizona from Iowa with her husband in the mid-1960s, she was a school teacher. In the following years, she attended law school at Arizona State University and then practiced law with the firm Fennemore Craig. She even served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Now, though, she’s about to leave that life behind and begin retirement at the end of June.
“I know more of what I’m not going to do,” McGregor says of her upcoming retirement.
The not-to-do list, she said, includes finding a full-time job, practicing law or incurring any ongoing obligations.
After years of cranking out opinions and serving as the overseer of the state’s judicial system, McGregor recently sat down with the Arizona Capitol Times to provide an inside view of the justice system and the life of a judge.
You spent about 15 years as an attorney before you applied to become a judge on the Court of Appeals, and you have been in the public sphere since then. What inspired you to become a judge?
I never thought about it until I took a year off to become a law clerk for Justice O’Connor. That year — seeing the appellate court process, and that was at a very high level — that was when I really started thinking this might be something I’d like to do.
It’s a totally different skill-set than being a trial lawyer, and you have to think about whether you have the skill-set. I always loved trying cases, but I also liked doing research and writing and having time to think about issues. And, I have told people before, the more experience you get as a lawyer, the less your clients can afford to pay you to do that basic work of analysis and writing. That gets turned over to associates, and you do the depositions and trial work and so forth.
And you know, the practice of law was changing. It was getting more cutthroat, it was getting more focused on the bottom line. The loyalties to firms and between clients and their lawyers were really being chipped away. It was becoming a practice and was losing some of the things I really valued. It seemed a good time with all of those considerations to move to the Court of Appeals if I could be appointed, and Governor Mofford did that.
Looking back, what are you most proud of during your service?
In general, I believe — and there might be those who disagree — that I have approached cases fairly. I have really tried to look at cases objectively and decide them on the basis of the law and the facts. And I’m comfortable saying I have always done that. Since that is the basic responsibility of a judge, that’s what I’d be most proud of.
Have you ever felt that you have paid a personal price by becoming a judge, and of course, later a justice, in terms of making more money in private practice or you could have associated more freely with people without worry over appearances?
You do pay some prices. If you come from private practice, you pay a financial price. But you know that coming in as a judge.
My view is that it is good for the salaries to at least keep pace with inflation because I don’t think you expect to get paid a lot less, effectively, than when you started. But, you know you are going to lose financially, and I think that’s something I think we all expect.
You do have some limitations as to what you can do, but I haven’t found being a judge to be terribly limiting, partly because I was never politically active. If you were politically active and then you became a judge, then it changes very much in what you can do. You still get to vote and so forth, but you can’t actively support political candidates and so forth. It didn’t really make a big difference for me. There were changes, but nothing huge.
Were there any incidents that really solidified, in your mind, the transition that you made?
I knew, intellectually, that being a judge I got to approach cases objectively, but I think it was fairly early on that I realized how freeing that was, because as a lawyer you have to be looking for arguments in an outcome that is best for your client.
As a judge, you really get to start a case with the issues and existing law and you work your way through the issues and you come out where you come out, and it doesn’t matter because you don’t have a personal stake in it.
I think the sense of being really free to just do an unbiased analysis of legal issues was maybe my “aha moment” where I found that’s really the way it is when you are a judge.
Where do you think you would be now and what would you be doing if you we’re never selected under merit selection and never appointed to the bench?
The one thing I always considered was the possibility of going back to teaching. I don’t know whether I really would have done that or whether a law school would have hired me.
If I hadn’t become a judge, I think I would have stayed in private practice, most likely.
You’ve been a key supporter of merit selection for judges, and you have appeared before lawmakers to defend the system from legislative efforts to make judges campaign for office. Is that a role you had personal difficulties doing, or did you take it as duty?
I think, as the chief justice and as any judge, you do have a responsibility to talk about issues that impact the administration of justice, and there are very few things that affect that more than the method used to select judges.
The support for merit selection was one that came easily to me because I started practicing the same year we adopted merit selection. So, my early years of practice were all before judges who had been initially elected to the bench. That was 35 years ago, and people have forgotten the wide range of ability.
There were some judges who were terrific, but there were some judges who were just good campaigners. They should not have been on the bench. They couldn’t leave their personal views aside. They did not spend the time preparing to make their decisions. They did tend to rule for their supporters and their friends, and it is very hard for a system to work well if you have such a wide disparity in the ability of judges.
I saw what happened to Arizona’s judges through merit selection. I saw the kinds of people who were appointed. It came very easily as a lawyer and later as a judge to support merit selection. It increased diversity, and it has really given us overall a better quality of judges. It has gotten 85 percent of our state judges out of these elections where more and more money needs to be raised that is destructive.
I think anybody who really looks at it would become a supporter of a system that does as much as we can to guarantee good judges.
Were you nervous when you first became a judge?
Oh yeah. I was afraid I would ask a really stupid question. I was nervous when I filed my first opinions that I wrote that somebody would file a motion for reconsideration, saying “Stupid judges, how could you have missed this?”
I think you are nervous about those things because, as judges, you are generalists, and I think we all worry there would be something we missed in a case that would have some impact that we didn’t foresee because you can’t be experts in all of these areas.
I t
hink that’s a good kind of nervous. I think it makes you more careful. You do the best that you can, and that’s the way the system is set up — to have some ways to correct legal error if it comes in. I can’t remember who originally said it, but it was about the U.S. Supreme Court and it was: “We aren’t last because we’re always right, we’re always right because were last.”
What do you consider to be the most difficult legal decision that you have made in your career as a judge and justice?
Some of the legal issues are just so hard to untangle, and sometimes they’re hard because the factual situation is one that leads you as a person to want it to come out differently than it has to come out under the law.
Sometimes they are difficult because they are so badly presented and it’s more difficult to work past the misdirection of the lawyers. They’re difficult for different reasons, and I’ve never identified one or two or three cases that I think are the hardest.
Are there any cases or legal questions that come to mind that you were particularly interested in weighing in on or answering?
I think most people become appellate judges because they really like dealing with the legal issues. Because we’re a court primarily of discretionary jurisdictions and we decide what issues to take, I think all of our cases are like that. It’s something that makes this a great job, because you’re always dealing with interesting cases.
One of the things about law is that when you get into a legal issue it almost always turns out to be interesting. In private practice, when I started doing tax appeals I was just doing it as a favor to one of the lawyers. But the more I got into the issues, the more interesting it became. And sometimes the ones you think would be the most interesting turn out to not be as interesting as you expected.
I think anybody who works as an appellate judge would have to find all legal issues interesting, or the job would be very hard to do.
Were there any cases presented to you that left you with a sense of dread, maybe the question was so difficult or the impacts were so important?
I don’t think a sense of dread would be the way I would describe it. Certainly, there are some cases that you enter with a very real sense of responsibility that’s been placed upon you as a member of the court. You really hope that you come to the right decision, or maybe the better-reasoned decision is the best way to describe it.
In every capital case, you are deciding whether the death penalty remains in place or not. That’s a pretty big responsibility.
In cases with parental-severance issues — when are parents’ rights to their child are severed and under what conditions — that’s a big responsibility.
When you decide when somebody who is injured gets to keep or loses a recovery they may have gotten in a trial court, that’s a big responsibility.
Tax issues — whether a company pays or doesn’t pay hundreds of millions of dollars — that’s a big responsibility.
I can’t ever remember thinking I dreaded to decide something, but there have been a lot of times when I have been very aware of the importance of reaching a decision carefully.
It seems that every two years the court is asked to determine whether citizen ballot initiatives will or will not qualify for the ballot. Is this a process that gets tiring, or do you look forward to continually ruling on election law?
The election laws are very interesting. I’ve said before that I think one of the problems is that these are some of the most important cases that come before us because they do determine whether something gets on the ballot, whether something that is on the ballot can be enforced and whether a candidate can stay on the ballot or not.
Because of the way election law has developed in Arizona, these cases come to us in a very short timeframe, from the time they start in the Superior Court until they come to us or the Court of Appeals, we’re in a very condensed timeframe.
These are the kinds of cases, I think, where we would like to have more time. We would like to have that three months (a usual time-span for the release of an opinion) to decide what will happen.
Whenever we are working on an opinion under normal circumstances, we can change our mind before we actually publish an opinion. But in these cases, the decision has to often be made very quickly. The lawyers have very little time to get their briefing done; the court has very little time to consider it.
I know there is some interest among some members of the Legislature in looking at the constitutional and statutory provisions to say, “Is there some way we can have this be not so condensed?” I think that would be helpful to everybody involved. With that said, when those cases come, we just put everything aside and put in a lot of time to resolve them and come to the better-reasoned decision.
Since you surprised people with your announcement to retire, have you had any second guesses?
No, because I had decided about a year earlier and I had a lot of time to think about it and I weighed the pros and cons, and thought about the best timing.
There is always some modicum of doubt because I’m doing something I find interesting. It’s a great job, but you have to retire at some point. The Constitution says I need to retire four years from now, so it wasn’t like I’d do this for another 20 years if I didn’t retire this year.
There’s some doubt, but I kind of approach it the same way I would a decision of the court. You really go down and you come to a decision and you hope it’s the best one.