I’m pleased to congratulate Jean Toal on her re-election as chief justice of South Carolina.
And I congratulate South Carolina, because it has just renewed its lease on one of the finest legal minds I’ve encountered in my time in my decades of observing the public sphere in my home state.
Which is not to denigrate Costa Pleicones, who mounted such a creditable challenge to her bid for re-election. He would have been, and still may one day be, a fine chief justice. In the meantime, we are fortunate to have his continued service as an associate justice. Based on everything I’ve ever seen or heard, he would have been my first choice to head the court if we could no longer have Jean Toal in that post.
This way, we don’t have to be deprived on any count. We continue to have the service of two people who are superbly suited to their positions.
It’s weird how this happens sometimes in South Carolina. Too often, elections are about choosing the lesser of two weevils, as Jack Aubrey would have said had he ever actually existed.
But from time to time, we’re offered a choice between two candidates so strong that you hate to have to reject one — you wish we had a way of spreading that wealth around. Some legislative districts seem unfairly blessed in this way. An example of the kind of election I’m talking about was when Anton Gunn challenged Bill Cotty back in 2006. Forced to choose, we endorsed Cotty, but then I was pleased to see Gunn run again and win two years later. (And sorry to see him leave his House seat.)
I’m glad we didn’t have to turn away either of these two candidates.
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She should have stepped down and let him have a go. I have never heard the sort of drunken bullying stories about him that I have about her.
All these great old post-retirement age people just keep South Carolina powering ahead on all cylinders.
I kind of thought a younger third candidate would have plowed through the petty noise of the 70+ crowd’s tussle in this state house judicial election. Sheheen, for one example…
Toal may have a keen legal (or is that political?) mind, but she certainly comes with a number of distasteful personal habits. Running again at 70 probably least among them.
Her mind is keen on both fronts — legal and political.
I first saw her in action when she was still in the House. I went over to watch a committee meeting that was dealing with some particularly knotty issue in the last days of a session. She wasn’t the chair, but she ran the meeting. She just stepped right over the chairman and drove the process relentlessly toward resolution. She was so much more on top of the facts of the matter than anyone else in the room, and it was obvious — probably painfully obvious, to some members.
That might go into the category of what Kathryn describes as “bullying;” I don’t know. She was the smartest person in the room and she rubbed everybody’s faces in the fact, as I recall it. In her place, I’d have tried to be more diplomatic. But it did seem good to me to see a legislative process being guided with intelligence rather than fecklessness or foolishness, cowardice or ennui. We get to see enough of that.
Simple question: What has she accomplished?
What cases has she been involved with that positively changed this state?
As an administrator — the CJ is kind of the CEO of the Judiciary — she has done a great deal to push State Courts into using better technology. There’s more to do on that front, though. Eventually, it would be wonderful to have a State Court system that is similar to the Federal Court system. (Mandatory discovery, scheduling orders, assigned judges, electronic filing, hard deadlines, etc.)
She has also been a strong advocate for the Judiciary branch in obtaining more judges, more funding, etc. Even with the expanded judiciary a few years ago, South Carolina still has close the highest ratio of pending cases to sitting judges in the entire country, so there’s more to go on that front.
As for her jurisprudence, I’ll leave that to the experts.
Word is she is especially bullying to waitstaff when she has been drinking….shame on her if it is true.
Well, it’s over, anyway.
I wonder how much non-lawyers care about the race for Chief Justice. As a practicing lawyer, I’ll have to refrain from commenting on the record.
It matters to all who live or work in the State of SC, actually. All judicial selections matter to everyone.
At least she will soon be gone; all of this was just about not wanting to exit gracefully it appears.
I predict that Toal will strike down that state law requiring Supreme Court judges to retire at 72.