Judicial Section Presiding Member Wants To Reestablish Decorum and Support Law School Students
7.3.2025
Justice Brian Burns, the new presiding member of the Judicial Section, wants to see more decorum in the profession and hopes to expose more law school students to careers in the judiciary.
He has an internship for law school students in his own chambers and points to the Judicial Mentorship Program and the Rural Pathways pilot that launched this summer. Presiding Justice Elizabeth Garry, Appellate Division, Third Department, and Sarah Cowen, associate court attorney for Otsego County Court Judge Michael F. Getman, helped launch the pilot project.
Justice Burns said he wants to expand his internship program. He now has six or seven interns including some from Syracuse University College of Law who are living in Taiwan, San Francisco, and Connecticut and are fulfilling their responsibilities remotely.
“I think a significant way the judiciary can give back to the future lawyers of our system is by giving them significant exposure to the courts in a manner that would be customized by each judge in each set of chambers. It may be purely experiential, but it still has value,” he said.
The Judicial Mentorship Program, which Justice Joanne Quinones directs, is run through the Franklin Williams Commission on Judicial Diversity, the nation’s first permanent commission dedicated to racial and ethnic fairness in the courts. The mentorship program is designed to support attorneys who are interested in becoming judges.
A different, yet just as valuable, experience is provided by Rural Pathways. It provides incentives for young, outgoing law students to move to areas of New York that don’t have enough lawyers. The state’s court system provides funding for six law students to visit those upstate rural areas. Law students spend time with judges, district attorneys and public defenders during the six-week internships.
“It’s almost like a recruiting trip. They see court, we take them to ballgames and really try to show them what upstate New York is like,” said Justice Burns. “And it’s not just the more rural areas. A lot of them have never been to Albany so they don’t know what it is like. They don’t know the cultural opportunities there whether they’re going to a museum, auditing some college classes, going fishing, or taking a bike ride. We want to expose them to all upstate New York.”
A Focus on Collegiality
Burns added that making the courts more collegial has to be an ongoing effort. He said he has increasingly seen antagonistic attitudes from attorneys in his courtroom. He understands that a courtroom is an adversarial place but doesn’t think that should mean that attorneys can’t be collegial.
“I’d like to see it get back towards that old ideal of when you’re in court you fight like heck and afterwards you shake each other’s hand and go have lunch together. I see all these ad hominem attacks, and you know we’re all going to be practicing law tomorrow, regardless of how a particular case ends up. There is no need for the adversarial part of the profession to cause us to be less collegial with each other.”
