As part of its Fireside Chat and Pizza series, the Institute of Government and Politics at Utah State University invited U.S. District Court Judge Robert Shelby to speak this week to students.
Judge Robert Shelby’s name is synonymous now with his December 2013 decision that Utah’s ban on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. His opinion in Kitchen v. Herbert made legal same-sex marriage a possibility for over a thousand Utahns and has been cited in some 30 other court rulings.
But that’s not why Neil Abercrombie, USU’s director of government relations, invited him to campus. Judge Shelby is an Aggie and a friend of Utah State University. Abercrombie invited him to talk to students about the experience of being a judge...as a possible career path for students.
Judges can be difficult public speakers because they can’t really talk much about their job, but Judge Shelby says he thinks judges should get out there more often to talk about what judges do and how they do it….in general terms.
That didn’t stop audience members from asking about specific cases, including Kitchen v. Herbert.
“Let me first say I shouldn’t talk about any of that and I won’t talk about any of that.” responds Shelby to one direct question about the responsibility of of having to decide the same-sex marriage case.
But he is allowed to talk about how he feels and what he feels time and time again as a judge, he says, is humility. “I come back into my chambers after whatever kind of ruling," he says, "And I think to myself this job is bigger than any single person could ever hope to be.”
When asked if he has time with his caseload to pause and see what happens to his decisions, especially landmark decisions, he answers no. “You do the best work you can, you work as hard as you can to understand the issues," he says, "You do your very best to get the right result, then you give your ruling and you move to the next case.”
He says he doesn’t give cases a second thought but that’s a function of the job. He cares what happens to the parties involved, he says, but he has to get back to work right away to give each case the attention it deserves.
Judge Shelby’s ruling in the Kitchen v. Herbert case was upheld by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in June of this year, but the court petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court who will have the final say. In the mean time Judge Shelby, who is the youngest federal judge on the bench in Utah, has moved on. He’s issued nearly one hundred opinions since last December, but nothing that’s stuck in the news quite like Kitchen v. Herbert.