Alaska’s highest court will have a new chief justice in January, and for the first time in its history, the court will be majority female.

Justice Susan Carney has served on the Alaska Supreme Court since 2016, and fellow justices recently selected her to be chief justice when current Chief Justice Peter Maassen retires in mid-January. Gov. Mike Dunleavy also announced this week the appointment of Aimee Anderson Oravec to fill Maassen’s seat, meaning the state’s high court will be comprised of three women and two men.

Carney, a longtime Fairbanks resident and former public defender, describes the female majority as a historic and remarkable occasion.

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Susan Carney: I mean, personally, I think that’s great. I think it’s important for any court and any court system to reflect the community that it serves. Male judges have dominated the court system since it was created, and it’s about time that, at least for a bit, there’s a majority of women on the Supreme Court. The Court of Appeals previously was all women, until a fourth judge was added. As a woman, I’m pretty happy about it. I’m also happy to have another Fairbanks justice. This is also the first time that the court will have a majority of justices not in Anchorage.

Casey Grove: Yeah, that is interesting. So in this role as Chief Justice, you’re the head administrator for the judicial branch of the state. Justice Maassen had delivered the State of the Judiciary (speech) last year, and Chief Justice Winfree before that. And I think both of them mentioned some challenges. One of those challenges was just access to the judicial system, and I think that means both buildings and in other ways. Where are we at with that?

SC: You know, somewhat strangely, some of the things that we learned during the pandemic have really helped that. I practiced in Fairbanks my whole career as a public defender. I had lots and lots of cases in remote villages. And number one, there aren’t courthouses in really small villages. We try to have at least a part-time magistrate judge in the bigger hub communities. But for people that live in real small, remote villages, getting physically to a court is difficult at best and often impossible. So we’ve learned so much about using technology that makes it much easier for people to appear in court by video, which is dramatically better than calling in by phone, so that right there makes a big difference in people’s access.

CG: And I guess another challenge that has come up just since the pandemic is this backlog of cases. And I think that’s been mentioned every year since the pandemic started, basically. But where are we at with that? And I guess in your role, I mean, how do you look at that?

SC: You know, the whole court system is really devoted to trying to cut this backlog, and we’ve made real strides at every level. Our Judicial Conference at the end of October had an entire day devoted to, you know, “Here are concrete things that all of us, judges at every level, can do to try and move these things along.” And we really have made a significant step toward cutting down the backlog, which is not to say it isn’t still there, but we really are working toward it.

CG: Yeah. You know, I saw in the bio that the court system sent out about your selection to be the chief justice that you have a strong history in sports, in softball and basketball and soccer. And I wonder, through your career, have you learned lessons from participating in team sports that have, you know, maybe helped you with your work?

SC: Absolutely, and I think most surprisingly and most relevant to this job, when I interviewed with the governor for this job, I was asked, why could I possibly think I could do this? Because I’ve been a public defender forever, doing almost exclusively criminal matters, and the Supreme Court doesn’t. The Court of Appeals gets all the criminal matters. And what I said was there are five people on this court, which is like a basketball team, and different justices bring different experience the same way different roles on a basketball team are filled by tall people or short people, or the one that can pass the best. And pretty much from that moment on, the conversation and interview revolved around basketball.

CG: He probably gets asked a lot if he plays or played basketball, I imagine.

SC: And Gov. (Bill) Walker, at one point, was asking me, “Well, I’ve played it, I grew up and I played in these villages. Did you play in those villages?” No, but, you know, I’ve played in Anaktuvuk for a number of years.

CG: Yeah. I wanted to ask you about something related to the governor’s office, and, I mean, the current administration. There was a dispute, if you want to call it that — or maybe dissatisfaction, I think is the way some people described it — a few years ago about the selection process for judges, and I think including Supreme Court justices, in that the governor and some others had expressed dissatisfaction about that process, that there’s only the three names that get recommended by the Alaska Judicial Council. Side note, the Chief Justice is a deciding vote on that council. Do you see that issue as being settled? Is that going to come back? I mean, do you think that’s something you’ll have to deal with eventually?

SC: It may come back. I don’t really have a crystal ball. I know that there are people that feel strongly that having a different process for selecting judges would be better. My understanding of how we got to where we are, boiled down to its most basic, is because we came into the United States so late, we had the ability — we, meaning the constitutional delegates — to look at what every other state had done, except for Hawaii, and figure out what they thought was the best way to pick it. And they put a lot of time and effort into it.

I think it works well. I think that it’s important for judges to not be political. Our ethical standards require us not to. We cannot be swayed by political concerns or favoritism for a litigant or our emotions. And this process, by and large, takes out the political nature of who gets to be a judge. You know, the governor ultimately gets to pick, and the governor, of course, is a politician.

CG: One thing I really wanted to ask you, as we’ve been watching oral arguments here recently, like with the United States Supreme Court, we kind of get an idea of what the justices are thinking based on the questions that they ask the folks giving oral arguments. But then, when you make a decision, or before you make a decision on a case, there’s conference between the justices, and that’s not something that we get to see. I just wonder, what is that like? I mean, are those arguments? Are they heated? What is it like?

SC: Rarely. It’s very cordial, really, somewhat formal, particularly for me, having come from a public defender agency where things are not formal. It is at times somewhat emotional, where people vehemently believe in a position, but it is always, always polite. It is rarely heated. I can’t remember more than a handful of times in the time I’ve been on the court where anyone’s voice was actually raised at another justice.

CG: Maybe cordial, but does it get contentious?

SC: I mean, it can, and if there really are just fundamental disagreements that will lead to there being an opinion in the case and a dissent. That really doesn’t happen very much here, you know, certainly not in comparison to the United States Supreme Court, where there are certain cases that people can look at and pretty accurately predict that there will be a majority and there will be a dissent, and who will be in which. We work hard to not dissent, unless it’s really critical. People are asking us to answer a particular question, and they want the right answer for it. And if there is a right answer, there shouldn’t be a couple of them or three of them. If there really is a correct answer, we should be able to get together and figure out what it is, and then make that clear to people.

CG: That’s interesting. It does, you know, from the outside, seem very different than the U.S. Supreme Court.

You know, I know the Supreme Court deals with actual legal marital disputes, but, you know, I wonder, do people hear what you do for a living, do they bring their trivial disputes to you? You know, like, should the toilet paper be put on this way or that way?

SC: No, I don’t think people ask me about legal things much. Nowhere near as much as they did when I was a public defender. And then there would be a steady stream of friends that would say, “I don’t know any ‘real’ lawyers, so let me ask you this.”

CG: Oh, come on! But you are a real lawyer!

Casey Grove is host of Alaska News Nightly, a general assignment reporter and an editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him atcgrove@alaskapublic.org. Read more about Caseyhere.