Sometimes one wonders why an obvious step in improving the judicial system takes so much time to effect. For example, enacting a bill as the first step in regionalizing the state’s municipal courts. Such regionalization has been urged by chief justices from Joseph Weintraub to Stuart Rabner.

The first effort to regionalize municipal courts was in 1958 when Chief Justice Weintraub called for the institution of a system of 21 “municipal” courts to deal with municipal court matters, with the judges to be appointed by the governor. Why then we have to ask had that common sense proposal not been successful during all of these years? Chief Justice Wilentz, who noted the failure to restructure the municipal system, stated that it was due in part to “a strong tradition of local self-government … the people who have the power to make the appointment want to keep the power to make the appointment.”