I did not enter office on January 1, 2021 into a blank institutional field. I entered a court already shaped by decades of consolidation, delegation, and administrative refinement. That fact matters because the re-precincting dispute cannot be understood as if it arose in a conventional county with wholly separate local justice courts. Pima County was and is different. The political life of re-precincting in Pima County inhered in the tension between two institutional truths that had coexisted uneasily for years: first, the justice of the peace remained a territorial, elected, precinct-based constitutional office; second, the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court had long operated as a centrally administered court in which many of the most important managerial functions no longer tracked precinct boundaries in any simple way.

The court’s own internal training history captured that duality well. The document titled History of the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, dated September 21, 2020, recounts that on February 22, 1974, the Arizona Supreme Court established centralized administration of the Tucson-area justice courts under the presiding judge of the superior court. It explains that later orders and practices continued that arrangement, producing what became the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, with Ajo and Green Valley operating separately. The same document also notes that justice of the peace jurisdiction remained tied to precincts under the Arizona Constitution and Arizona statutes. In other words, the court was at once territorial and centralized. It lived in both registers at the same time.⁶

The formal legal sources show the same pattern. Article VI, section 1 of the Arizona Constitution vests the judicial power in “an integrated judicial department.” Article VI, section 3 gives the Arizona Supreme Court administrative supervision over all the courts of the state. At the same time, A.R.S. section 22-101 authorizes the Board of Supervisors to divide the county into justice precincts, change them, abolish them, or redistrict the county, while providing that abolition does not take effect until the term of the justice and constable then in office expires. A.R.S. section 22-102 provides that the officers of justice precincts are a justice of the peace and a constable elected by the qualified electors of the precinct. A.R.S. section 22-125 creates the regime of judicial productivity credits that helps determine compensation and, when credits exceed 1,200, requires the Board to create sufficient courts or redraw precincts.⁷

That framework alone would have been enough to make re-precincting politically sensitive. But the timing of my entry made the situation more complicated still. Administrative Order 2020-115, issued in July 2020, responded to a vacancy in the justice court administrator position by designating Presiding Judge Kyle Bryson of the Superior Court to supervise the day-to-day operations of the PCCJC, including the duties of the administrative judge, until further order. The same order appointed an interim justice court administrator with full authority over administrative matters of the PCCJC and specifically directed Bryson and Kent Batty to report to the Chief Justice on governance changes that might improve the existing structure. In short, by the time I took office, the administrative structure of the court was not only centralized. It was actively under review.⁸

The court’s own internal history is even plainer about why AO 2020-115 mattered. It records that the court administrator resigned after a majority of the justices of the peace voted “no confidence” in her abilities, and it links that rupture directly to the Chief Justice’s decision to install interim administrative leadership and require a governance report. From inside the court, that moment was not remembered as routine personnel turnover. It was remembered as the event that triggered a more visible Arizona Supreme Court takeover of PCCJC governance. My own recollection, and the political memory of the court, was that Judge Douglas Taylor’s vote was widely understood as the but-for vote in the 2020 no-confidence episode. The surviving administrative orders do not assign that causal weight to any one judge, so I present that final point as remembered internal history rather than as something the orders themselves prove. What the archive does prove is that the no-confidence vote, Lisa Royal’s resignation, and AO 2020-115 belonged to the same governance crisis.⁹

The later-recovered county memoranda make that rupture harder to treat as background only. The rupture itself had already acquired a public ethical cast. Contemporary reporting stated that Royal pleaded guilty to a DUI in March 2020, that fellow judges treated the matter as a serious leadership problem for the court administrator and former justice of the peace, and that she resigned in June 2020 after the judges cast what they described as a no-confidence vote.¹⁰ Nor did Royal’s reappearance in county administration occur against a blank institutional background. The consolidated bench was still living with the afterimage of the Bee era. Keith Bee, then the presiding justice of the peace, had left the bench shortly before his September 2018 federal indictment tied to the bus-transportation business he operated; the matter later remained in public view because it ended in a guilty plea and felony conviction for filing a false tax return. Contemporary reporting also stated that corporate filings showed Bee and Royal had formally become partners in that same transportation business, a relationship some judges regarded as a conflict when Royal returned to court administration. I do not treat those facts as proof that the later re-precincting effort was retaliatory in any legally demonstrable sense. I do say they explain why Royal’s return, and then her central place in the early workload and reprecincting memoranda, did not read from chambers as politically innocent or institutionally detached. Within months of the no-confidence episode, Royal had reappeared in Huckelberry’s office and was authoring or supplying the early workload and reprecincting memoranda. On February 8, 2021, Huckelberry directed Royal to plan on re-precincting the justice court precincts because, in his view, the precincts could be reduced by two. On March 2, Royal wrote that Precincts 3 and 5 were the only precincts in which both the JP and constable ran in 2022 and that “the obvious choice would be Precinct 5.” On June 14, her proposed schedule treated elimination of Precinct 5 before the October 1 deadline as the working premise. Huckelberry later wrote publicly that he had hired Royal and asked her to research PCCJC JP workload. I do not say this sequence alone proves retaliation. I do say it establishes a connection the history should not obscure: the judge whom internal court memory treated as the decisive no-confidence vote against Royal later saw Royal, now working for Huckelberry, help build what I regarded as a rushed, election-deadline-driven reduction process that converged on abolishing Taylor’s precinct.¹¹

The partisan setting sharpened how later events were read. Pima County justices of the peace still came to office through partisan elections. Public election reporting from November 2020 showed an incoming Board of Supervisors in which Democrats held all but one seat, with Steve Christy as the lone Republican and Rex Scott’s District 1 victory flipping a previously Republican seat.¹² Contemporary local election coverage likewise described Taylor as the GOP primary winner for JP5 in 2018.¹³ None of that proves that every later act of county administration was partisan in purpose. It does help explain why, from chambers, re-precincting never felt politically sterile.

The personnel memory of the court sharpened that impression. I entered office in the aftershock of more than one governance controversy. Maria Felix remained a major figure in the court’s institutional memory, not only because she had served in presiding and chief-administrative leadership roles in the consolidated court, but because public records tied that earlier leadership era to formal discipline and abrupt administrative transition. The Commission on Judicial Conduct publicly reprimanded Felix in 2017 for campaign-related conduct, and Arizona Supreme Court Administrative Order 2016-147 recited that she had recently resigned as Chief Administrative Justice of the Peace, requiring the temporary appointment of Judge Susan Bacal and a new appointment process to carry the leadership term into 2020. I do not collapse the 2021 re-precincting dispute into the Felix matter. I do say that I took office in a court that already knew what it meant for leadership questions to spill into formal public record, Supreme Court intervention, and contested legitimacy. That history made later claims of purely technical neutrality harder to accept at face value.¹⁴

That process continued. Administrative Order 2020-189, issued in November 2020, clarified and realigned leadership duties. The order preserved the 1974 centralization, placed effective and efficient administration of the justice courts under the responsibility of the presiding superior-court judge, permitted a designated liaison between that judge and the justices of the peace of the PCCJC, and, crucially, stated that the presiding justice of the peace of Pima County would have no supervisory authority over the operations of the consolidated court except as specifically provided or directed.¹⁵ Administrative Order 2021-105, issued on June 30, 2021, then transferred Bryson’s supervisory role to incoming Presiding Judge Jeffrey Bergin effective July 1, 2021, at precisely the moment the re-precincting controversy was becoming public.¹⁶

I dwell on these orders because they clarify something important about the episode. The dispute over re-precincting did not occur in a court whose administrative lines were settled and self-evident. It occurred in a court already living through governance transition, with superior-court-supervised authority explicitly strengthened and rearticulated. That meant the politics of re-precincting was never simply county versus judge, or Board versus precinct. It was layered: county administration, superior-court supervision, statewide administrative authority, court administration, constables, and elected justices all occupied overlapping positions within the same institutional problem.

That layered structure also affected the ordinary experience of office. In January 2021, I issued what I called my First Memo, in which I emphasized mission, the protection of constitutional rights, and the rule of law. The tone of that memo was collaborative. I was entering office wanting to learn, to work with staff, and to improve the administration of justice.¹⁷ By May 2021, however, I was already asking in writing what counted as the formal docket of the court, whether Agave or paper files were the official docket, and what prior administrative orders governed the institution. Those questions now read to me as early signs that I was confronting a court in which the practical location of authority and the formal location of responsibility did not always coincide.¹⁸

For scholarship on judicial politics, this prehistory matters. Lower-court conflict is often narratively flattened into a dispute over a single proposal. But proposals land in pre-existing institutional worlds. The proposal to eliminate a precinct landed in a court already centralized, already administratively supervised from above, already under governance review, and already marked by a longstanding tension between territorial election and pooled administration. Re-precincting did not create that tension. It activated it.

If I am to write this episode honestly from my own perspective, I have to begin by acknowledging that county administration did not appear to itself as an antagonist to justice. It appeared to itself as a steward confronting a governance problem. The official county memoranda make that point very clearly. The county’s case rested on a cluster of arguments that, from its vantage point, were mutually reinforcing.

The first was long-run decline in filings. In the July 27, 2021 response memorandum, County Administrator C.H. Huckelberry argued that staff had examined case-filing data going back to 2010 and that the decline was substantial even before the pandemic. Filings that had totaled 179,456 in 2010 had fallen to 117,704 by 2019, to 105,404 in 2020, and to a projected 88,803 in 2021. The point of the county’s presentation was not only that pandemic conditions had depressed court activity. It was that the decline long predated the pandemic and suggested a structural mismatch between the volume of work and the number of judicial officers in the consolidated court.²⁵

The second was judicial productivity credits. Under A.R.S. section 22-125, JPCs play a formal statutory role in justice court compensation and in determining when additional courts must be created or precinct boundaries redrawn. The county’s memo emphasized that projected FY21 JPCs were 878 per judge within the consolidated court, far below the 1,200 threshold at which the Board would be required to act. The county then went further, arguing that because hearing officers and a judge pro tempore handled certain categories such as small claims, civil traffic, and eviction matters, even the JPC figure overstated the actual workload of elected justices. On the county’s analysis, removing those non-JP-heard matters would lower the effective figure to 720. The administrative implication was clear: the system looked overbuilt relative to its measured obligations.²⁶

The third was the use of proxy metrics necessitated by the structure of the court itself. Because the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court was not operating as a collection of fully separate filing silos, the county could not simply count cases by the precinct in which they had originated. The July 27 memo stated that all cases were filed into Precinct 1 and then distributed among the eight judges. Only a fraction of criminal incident locations and civil defendant addresses could be mapped successfully by precinct. The county thus turned to what it regarded as a reasonable mix of indicators: filings, JPCs, time on the bench derived from the public calendar, time in the courthouse derived from key-card access data, and parking-garage data. County administration explicitly acknowledged that each indicator was imperfect. But the logic of the memo was cumulative. If several imperfect indicators all suggested relative underuse, then a structural response was justified even if no single measure was conclusive.²⁷

The fourth was election and governance timing. This point became even clearer in the September 21, 2021 memorandum. The county argued that the Board was not legally required to abolish a precinct, but if it wished to do so for the 2022 election cycle, action had to be taken in coordination with voter-precinct redistricting and the October 1 deadline. That timing constraint also shaped which precinct could be eliminated. According to the county, JP5 was the only consolidated-court precinct in which the justice-of-the-peace and constable terms both expired in 2022. Therefore, if the Board was going to reduce one precinct for the 2022 cycle, JP5 was the practical candidate.²⁸

This was a crucial detail, and it changed the politics of the matter in an important way. The live county proposal was not to eliminate my own precinct, JP6. It was to eliminate JP5, held by Judge Douglas Taylor, and to redistribute JP5 territory among adjacent precincts and, in some configurations, into Green Valley. That meant my intervention could not be reduced to defending my own map box. If anything, it sharpened the institutional dimension of my position. I was intervening not because my office was the immediate target, but because the court’s collective structure, workload distribution, territorial logic, and public meaning were at stake.

The Green Valley component also complicated the optics of the proposal. Public county materials show that Ray Carroll had served five terms on the Pima County Board of Supervisors, retired in January 2017, and then re-entered service in October 2017 as presiding judge in Green Valley before winning election in 2018. Because Arizona law ties a justice court’s salary to judicial productivity credits, any meaningful transfer of filings toward JP7 carried potential compensation consequences as well as workload consequences. I do not treat that chain of facts as proof that the Board acted to enrich one of its own. But I do think it helps explain why, from chambers, some of the live map options looked politically freighted rather than administratively neutral. The optics were sharpened further by later public discipline: in 2021 the Commission on Judicial Conduct publicly reprimanded Carroll after finding multiple instances in 2020 and 2021 in which he yelled at and was openly hostile to court and security staff. Those records do not settle the merits of re-precincting. They do show that the structural debate was unfolding in a field already crowded with public questions about governance, temperament, and who should be entrusted with institutional authority.²⁹

The fifth strand of the county’s case was legal and demographic. The July 30 memorandum laid out the re-precincting schedule, identified the Consolidated Justice Court and other actors as participants, and directed staff to develop multiple draft maps that would account for total population, demographics, voter registration, and constable papers served. The same memorandum emphasized the need to evaluate compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The September 21 memorandum then explained why that mattered in practical terms. Precincts 2, 4, and 9 were majority-minority precincts, and the county concluded that avoiding substantial changes to those boundaries was the simplest way to remain compliant. That constraint, in turn, affected how JP5 territory could be redistributed. In some options, parts of JP5 had to move toward JP7 Green Valley because shifting too much of that territory to other consolidated-court precincts would have had more significant effects on majority-minority precincts.³⁰

Read carefully, the July 30 and September 21 memoranda also show something else that is easy to miss if one approaches them only as adversarial exhibits. County administration was trying to stage the proposal as an orderly public process. The July 30 memorandum identified a sequence: legal review, map development, consultation with the consolidated court and constables, public notice, and later board consideration. The September 21 memorandum then described a public-hearing framework and referenced outreach to actors such as county party chairs, Chicanos por La Causa, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and the Election Integrity Commission. In other words, the county did not understand itself as engaged only in a fiscal trimming exercise. It understood itself as undertaking a politically sensitive restructuring that required a record of procedural legitimacy as well as an argument from workload and law.

The politics became more visible still in the map history itself. The September 21 memorandum states that the presiding constable and county staff developed two preliminary maps, but that staff also worked from an option developed by retired former Judge Paula Aboud and ultimately reduced the field because a third staff map was not thought warranted. In the surviving county paperwork, then, one of only a small number of live map concepts came from Aboud. That detail matters. Aboud was not an abstract cartographer. She was a retired judge, a former Democratic state senator, a recent partisan actor in the justice-court world, and my Democratic primary opponent for JP6 in 2020. Public record added another layer: in December 2017 the Arizona Supreme Court formally censured Aboud, ordered additional judicial ethics training, and assessed costs in judicial-discipline proceedings. I do not mention that censure to say that her views could simply be ignored or that a disciplined former judge has no institutional knowledge to contribute. I mention it because the county’s own paperwork shows that one of the live maps came from a former Democratic officeholder, former electoral opponent, and publicly disciplined judge rather than from a process standing wholly apart from the court’s own factions and memories. Inside the court, that mattered. It made the map process look less like dispassionate administration and more like the continuation of judicial politics by cartographic means.³¹ I still cannot document every private motive behind her participation. I can document that her participation was real and that, from chambers, it intensified the sense that re-precincting had become entangled with court politics.

That point matters to the history because it clarifies the real shape of the conflict. My objection was not that county administration ignored public legitimacy altogether. It was that the process of public legitimization still depended on a description of the court that I believed was too thin at its base. The county sought to legitimate restructuring through maps, deadlines, demographic caution, and formal opportunity for comment. I sought to challenge the adequacy of the institutional description upon which that legitimacy claim rested. That is a more precise disagreement, and a more revealing one, than the simpler story in which one side cared about process and the other resisted outcome.

To reconstruct the county’s case fairly, one must therefore resist a caricature. County administration did not present itself as waging a political vendetta against the judiciary. It presented itself as making a sober judgment that the consolidated court’s workload had declined, that the structure of eight full-time justices plus auxiliary hearing resources was hard to justify, that the 2022 cycle created a narrow window for change, and that Voting Rights Act and election-law constraints limited the possible map configurations. From that standpoint, re-precincting was not an attack on justice. It was governance.

That is precisely why the dispute mattered so much. The county’s case was not frivolous. It was not obviously lawless. It was not reducible to bad faith. The problem, as I saw it, was that the county’s model of the court was too thin. It took real data and real constraints but translated the institution into categories that did not bear the full weight of judicial labor, public trust, or local office. To say that is not to deny the county’s prudence on its own terms. It is to say that its terms were themselves contested.

If I had to identify the single most important substantive issue in the controversy, it would be this: what counts as judicial work in a local court? I say that now more firmly than I did at the time, even though I was already circling the point then. What appeared in 2021 as a series of disagreements over spreadsheets, calendars, building data, and workload indicators was in fact a more consequential dispute over the nature of judging in a consolidated, non-record, high-volume court.

County administration’s metrics were not irrational. They were, in a sense, the metrics available to an outside managerial actor looking in. If cases are filed into a consolidated system rather than neatly by precinct, one looks to long-run filings. If statutory workload is recognized through JPCs, one looks to JPCs. If those still seem too abstract, one examines public calendars for hours on the bench. If chambers work remains hard to see, one reaches for key-card and parking-garage data as rough proxies of presence. From the county’s point of view, these measures were imperfect but cumulative. No single metric was definitive. But several together, the county believed, gave a sufficiently reliable picture of declining demand and relative underuse.³⁶

The instability of those proxies was not merely theoretical. Internal bench recollection included the story that Judge Vince Roberts — the judge whose dismissal order in Weber briefly gave concrete form to doubts about the constitutionality or statutory coherence of the consolidated court’s assignment structure — would jump over the bench in his courtroom so that badge data would not capture his movements. I cannot document that anecdote from a surviving memorandum, transcript, or administrative report, so I present it only as remembered bench lore rather than proved fact. But it captures a real institutional point. Once badge data and similar traces were understood as inputs into managerial judgment, even the ordinary mechanics of entering and leaving a courtroom could begin to look politically charged rather than neutral.³⁷

The newly recovered February memoranda show how early and how firmly that metric regime had congealed. Royal’s February 4 planning memo framed the issue through decade-long filing decline, falling JPCs, and the peculiar distortions created by Pima’s consolidated structure, including the history of a pro tem “Precinct 11” whose work, in her telling, had left JPC figures artificially high because the official precinct count remained eight. Huckelberry’s February 8 note then converted that analytical frame into instruction, telling staff to plan on a two-precinct reduction based on JPCs. This matters because it shows that the county’s public summer metrics were not a hurried pandemic improvisation. They were the maturation of a measurement theory already in place by early February.³⁸

What I resisted was not only the sufficiency of those metrics but the underlying conception of the office they implied. A judge’s work in a local court is not exhausted by public bench time. It includes reading and deciding motions, reviewing “signature files,” managing chambers workflow, resolving matters not all of which become public calendar events, conducting remote hearings, responding to emergency issues, participating in orientation and continuing judicial education, coordinating with clerks and administrators, handling the administrative consequences of pooled calendars, and sharing burdens that are far more complex than the phrase “hours on bench” suggests. A court can be fully occupied in ways that remain partially invisible to the administrative gaze.

My July 28 reply to Huckelberry spelled out this problem in specific terms. County memoranda had emphasized that judges in Precincts 2 and 4 were working remotely, but omitted that by the end of May 2021 I too had been equipped to work remotely and had conducted dozens of hearings that way. County memoranda had used parking-garage data running from November 2020 through June 2021 even though I did not assume office until January 1, 2021. County memoranda had treated June 2021 building data as though my reduced time “in the building” required explanation even though court COVID policy had forced remote work on at least two of those days. County memoranda had not accounted for the Arizona Supreme Court’s requirement that new judicial officers complete three full weeks of judicial orientation during the first months of office. None of this was esoteric information. It was ordinary context. Yet without it the public record could imply a picture of judicial under-engagement that was false in a way not merely statistical but moral. That is why I wrote that I had remained “diligent at my post” and why I took the public presentation of the data as a serious matter.³⁹

The county’s own numbers, taken on their own terms, also reveal why the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple accusation that I objected because the data embarrassed me. The July 27 memorandum reported average daily time in the building for JP6 at 7:41 in April, 7:24 in May, and 5:48 in June. Those figures are not trivial. They are substantial working days, especially once one remembers the presence of remote work, orientation requirements, COVID-era operating constraints, and the mismatch between physical presence and the totality of judicial labor. I do not cite those numbers to claim that the county’s framework secretly vindicated me. I cite them because they show the instability of the framework itself. Even a metric the county treated as suggestive of underuse could just as plausibly be read, with proper context, as evidence of ordinary and sustained labor.

The same is true of the county’s treatment of hearing officers and the judge pro tempore. On the county’s account, their participation showed that the elected bench’s workload was lower than raw filing numbers might imply. But from within chambers, those auxiliary arrangements looked different. They were not simply deductions from judicial necessity. They were part of the institution’s adaptive architecture: responses to surges, specialty needs, calendar design, pandemic disruptions, and the ongoing effort to keep matters moving. Auxiliary personnel do not eliminate judicial labor; they redistribute, coordinate, and sometimes even generate new layers of oversight and interdependence. To count them only as reasons to discount the work of elected judges is to see only one side of the institutional equation.

One of the most revealing lines in the official county response memo is, in fact, a concession. Huckelberry acknowledged that time on the bench is “not a total reflection of workload” and that there are “many administrative tasks that occur in chambers.” That concession is significant because it shows the county understood the conceptual problem. Yet the county’s answer was to continue using bench time together with building and parking data in order to construct a broader inferential picture. From my vantage point, that answer did not cure the problem. It compounded it. It made the court visible through precisely the kinds of data most likely to favor publicly legible activity over quieter but equally essential work.

The bench notes show that the judges recognized this quickly. The April 23 note that the data did not tell the “whole story” of what we do here is the earliest preserved articulation of the problem. The June 28 note that “bell-curve calendars give warped perception” states it more sharply. Those phrases are important because they reveal that the concern was never simply personal defensiveness. It was institutional. A bell-shaped, outward-facing calendar could make a court appear lightly used even if chambers, administrative follow-through, and less visibly distributed obligations remained substantial. The problem, in other words, was epistemic before it was political: a distorted model of work was being built into the categories that would then justify structural change.⁴⁰

The logic of those metrics could also slide easily into innuendo. I remember Huckelberry, in one meeting, insinuating that Judge Susan Bacal spent half the day in the gym. I do not have a verbatim transcript of that remark, and I therefore offer it as my recollection rather than as a formally documented quotation. But the recollection matters because it captured the spirit of the measurement regime at its worst: a veteran judge’s value could be translated into jokes or suspicions about bodily presence. That picture badly misdescribed Bacal. She was one of the court’s most intelligent and effective judges, a more than twenty-year member of the institution who had fine-tuned systems, accumulated practical wisdom, and learned how to move a docket with an efficiency that cannot be read off a garage log. The July 27 county memorandum lists Precinct 8 building-presence hours as if those figures settled the question. They did not. Experience can compress visible time precisely because experience reduces wasted motion.⁴¹

Later chambers documents reinforce this point, even though they do not by themselves prove the summer 2021 dispute. The February 2022 All Pending Caseload Summary associated my chambers with 1,069 active pending DUI, misdemeanor, and regular-civil matters and 1,126 inactive, warrant, or stayed matters, along with additional exclusion categories. The monthly summaries for February 2022 show that in regular civil I terminated 118 matters against 112 initial assignments; in misdemeanor, 95 matters against 61 initial assignments; and in DUI, 51 matters against 18 initial assignments.⁴² These spreadsheets are not summer 2021 records and I do not use them to rewrite the chronology. I use them because they show how little the work of a chambers can be captured by a few public metrics. One may terminate more than one receives in one category, carry a large pending inventory in others, and remain responsible for a wide array of work that no key-card system can meaningfully represent.

What this suggests to me now is that the metrics dispute was the episode’s most original jurisprudential and political feature. We were arguing about more than the prudence of one structural change. We were arguing about the ontology of judging in a local court. Is judging principally a matter of visible courtroom time, quantifiable filings, and physical presence in the courthouse? Or is it a broader professional and constitutional labor, distributed across hearings, preparation, supervision, orientation, systems management, remote modalities, and burdens that are legible only from inside the institution? The county did not ignore the second picture, but it did not allow that second picture to govern the design of its public frame. I believed the second picture was the more truthful one.

This is where lower-court politics and the politics of adjudication meet. In a local court, categories of measurement are never merely descriptive. They determine what kind of labor is visible to those who fund, supervise, reorganize, and evaluate the court. They shape the public reputation of judges. They influence whether the office appears essential or surplus. They become, in effect, instruments of institutional definition. That is why I do not think it overstates the matter to say that the fight over metrics was itself a fight over the political meaning of judging.

If the metrics dispute concerned what judicial work is, the territorial dispute concerned what a precinct is. The county’s public memoranda insisted, with some force, that equal population is not necessarily the controlling criterion for justice-precinct re-precincting, particularly in a consolidated court where judges do not always hear matters arising in the precinct that elects them. There is something undeniable in that observation. The formal territorial map and the day-to-day routing of cases had diverged in important respects. Yet I remained convinced that territory had not become merely symbolic.

My September 20 memorandum to the Board of Supervisors is the clearest expression of this conviction. There I wrote that the justice of the peace is a constitutional officer entrusted with the administration of justice in the community, and that the constituents of a justice precinct have a right to the public trust of that office. I meant that seriously. The phrase “public trust” was not ornamental rhetoric. It was my attempt to name what was being endangered if precinct elimination proceeded on an under-described record. A justice precinct is not only a workload container. It is a public form through which a community receives and recognizes local judicial authority.⁴⁵

The newly recovered February and April memoranda also show that territory remained bound up with the linked elected office of the constable. Huckelberry’s February 8 directive did not speak only of reducing judges. It stated that re-precincting could reduce the precincts by two, thereby eliminating two justices of the peace and two constables, with the change taking effect only at the next countywide election cycle for JPs. The April 20/27 constable exchange then made explicit that the constables themselves understood precinct boundaries as service infrastructure, not mere electoral cartography. Stevenson asked to be included because the constables possessed practical knowledge about workload and boundary design; Huckelberry replied that because the constables had not consolidated, reprecincting was the only available mechanism to normalize their workloads. This is important to the public-trust argument. The precinct was not only a box on a judicial map. It was a paired local office structure joining judge, constable, workload geography, and election cycle.⁴⁶

This did not mean I denied consolidation’s reality. On the contrary, one reason I cared so much about the issue was precisely that I knew how much consolidation had already changed the daily life of the court. Cases were pooled. Calendars were shared. Administrative authority was centralized. But none of that, in my view, erased the territorial and civic meaning of the office. If anything, it made that meaning more precarious and therefore more important to defend consciously.

The county’s own re-precincting memoranda demonstrate that territory retained political and legal significance even for those pressing change. The county treated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act as a major constraint. It worried about majority-minority precincts. It referenced “community of interest” in the redesign of lines around Rita Ranch. It coordinated with voter precincts and elections timing. All of this shows that the county itself did not understand judicial precincts as mere technical containers. It understood them as politically sensitive territorial units whose redesign required attention to demography, representation, and legality.⁴⁷

My own later writing remained consistent on this point. In the END OF TERM REPORT, discussing a case that I concluded should not remain in the consolidated court’s criminal jurisdiction, I wrote that “Territory remains a touchstone of jurisdiction.” That sentence comes from a 2025 retrospective report and therefore must not be treated as neutral evidence of every factual detail in 2021. But it is highly relevant as evidence of how I understood the office and its legal basis at the end of my term. Territory, in my view, was not a vestigial formality. It remained central to the question of where judicial authority properly lay.⁴⁸

The court’s own public administration also points in the same direction. A notice effective May 1, 2025, states that new civil case filings must identify the justice-of-the-peace precinct in which the case should be filed, and that filings lacking a precinct number would not be accepted. Whatever consolidation had accomplished administratively, precinct designation still mattered enough by the end of my term to become a front-end filing requirement. That is not proof that every territorial claim made in the summer of 2021 was sound. But it is strong evidence that precinct identity remained operationally real within the life of the court.⁴⁹

The deeper issue, however, is not only legal or operational. It is democratic. Justices of the peace in Arizona are elected by territorial constituencies. Voters do not elect “generic” consolidated judges floating free of place. They elect judges of precincts. That fact may coexist with centralized administration, but it cannot be dismissed by it. When county administration redraws precincts, or proposes to eliminate one, it is not merely shifting workflow. It is reshaping the territorial form through which public accountability and local trust attach to the office. That was why I thought the issue could not be decided on thin metrics alone.

I should add that I did not regard territory in a romantic or nostalgic way. I was fully aware that in a consolidated court, territorial identity can become blurred in daily operations. But the answer to that blurring, in my view, was not simply to declare territory secondary. It was to recognize that local judicial legitimacy in such a system depends on keeping faith with the precinct form even as administration becomes centralized. If the system continues to ask voters to elect precinct judges, then the system incurs an obligation to treat the precinct as more than a convenient shell.

One of the reasons I return to this episode as more than a local administrative dispute is that it changed how I think about judicial independence. In public discussion, judicial independence is often treated as synonymous with decisional independence: whether judges are free to decide cases without improper influence. That is the core meaning, and it matters deeply. In my Farewell Address, I said that no one at the court attempted to interfere with my judicial independence, and that in every case I was free to enter judgment according to law without outside pressure. I stand by that statement. It was important to me then and remains important now because it marks an ethical boundary that, in my experience, was not crossed.⁵²

But that is not the whole story of independence in a lower court. The re-precincting dispute forced me to think about at least three related but distinct forms of institutional freedom: decisional independence, administrative autonomy, and structural voice.

Decisional independence is the judge’s freedom to decide the case according to law and conscience. In that respect, I did not believe the re-precincting controversy compromised me directly. No one told me how to rule.

Administrative autonomy concerns who controls or meaningfully shapes staffing, calendars, workflow, space, budget, and the internal conditions of adjudication. Here the picture was more complex. Arizona’s administrative orders for Pima County had, by design, concentrated significant operational authority in the presiding superior-court judge and centralized court administration. Administrative Order 2020-189 made plain that the presiding justice of the peace would have no supervisory authority over the operations of the PCCJC except as the order itself or the presiding superior-court judge allowed. Administrative Order 2024-220 later carried that logic forward and made it even clearer. This meant that the elected justice of the peace, as such, did not command the institution in the way the public might assume from the title of the office.⁵³

Structural voice concerns whether the judge and the judiciary are heard in time and with enough seriousness to influence how the institution is publicly described and reorganized. This, I came to believe, was the central pressure point in the re-precincting episode. The court’s decisional independence remained intact, but its structural voice felt compromised by the way the metrics and public narrative were assembled.

This three-part distinction is not foreign to broader scholarship. Gordon Bermant and Russell Wheeler wrote that “judicial independence” covers overlapping categories including decisional, procedural, and administrative independence, and that judges may worry about external intervention into the operation of the judicial branch even when decisional independence is not directly threatened. Martin Redish likewise treated judicial independence as a concept extending beyond salary and tenure to the support services and operational conditions surrounding adjudication. I cite these works not because federal judicial scholarship governs a county justice court, but because they illuminate a distinction that I believe the Pima County controversy makes unusually concrete. A judge may be entirely free in judgment and yet still encounter political pressure in the structure, supervision, and public administration of the office.⁵⁴

What distinguishes the lower-court setting from the federal comparison is the territorial and electoral dimension. Federal judges are not elected by precinct. Their institutional identity is not mediated through a county Board of Supervisors with line-drawing authority under state statute. In Pima County, by contrast, administrative supervision from above coexisted with local electoral legitimacy from below. That coexistence made the question of independence peculiarly layered. The judge could be independent in cases yet dependent on superior-court and administrative structures for much of the institution’s daily operation. The public could hold the elected judge accountable while the judge lacked supervisory control over key elements of the court’s organization. And county administration could describe the court as overbuilt or underworked on the basis of aggregated metrics without ever formally intruding upon the judge’s rulings.

This produced a problem of public attribution that I do not think local-court scholarship has taken seriously enough. The elected judge is the visible face of the office. Voters, litigants, and even other government actors naturally attach responsibility to that face. Yet the administrative orders governing the PCCJC made clear that large parts of institutional control lay elsewhere. By the time the court’s public materials later linked to Administrative Order 2024-220 and openly identified a superior-court liaison, the formal structure was almost paradoxical: the justice of the peace remained the democratic and judicial face of the precinct office, but major lines of supervision, workflow authority, and administrative design had long since migrated into a different chain of command. Under those conditions, public accountability can become misaligned with public control.

That misalignment is one reason I came to think that lower-court independence must include more than decisional freedom and even more than a generalized plea for administrative autonomy. It must also include some meaningful capacity for a judicial office to contest the terms on which it is publicly evaluated. If a judge may be measured, criticized, restructured, or territorially diminished through categories the office had little role in defining, then the question is no longer only whether the judge is free to decide cases. It is whether the institution is free enough to defend an adequate description of its own labor.

This, I think, is one of the most important insights the archive offers to scholarship. Lower-court judicial independence is often treated as a diluted version of appellate or federal judicial independence. I no longer think that is the best way to see it. It is different, not just weaker. Its vulnerabilities run through structure, staffing, territorial office, measurement, and public narration. Those vulnerabilities are politically serious because lower courts are the places where most citizens actually meet the judiciary. If those courts can be reorganized on the basis of thin measures and partial consultation, then the politics of judicial independence is operating at a level both more mundane and more intimate than most constitutional theory notices.

No honest history of this episode can claim to have every piece of the record. I still do not have, within the preserved papers, a full transcript of the relevant Board of Supervisors hearing or every internal county working paper behind the public memoranda. Even with the benefit of later documentation, I cannot claim omniscience about every actor’s motive or every private deliberation. A source-based first-person account must be especially vigilant about this. My own later recollections, however sincere, do not authorize me to fill archival gaps with confidence.

What I can say is that the controversy did not vanish from my understanding of the court. The issues of territory, structure, governance, and voice persisted through the end of my term. The Farewell Address, though broader in purpose, still drew a line between decisional independence and the larger challenges of local judicial office. The END OF TERM REPORT returned explicitly to territorial jurisdiction. The Myers Report, written after my term, is far more polemical than I would want this essay itself to be, but it demonstrates unmistakably that I continued to regard the structure and governance of the PCCJC as questions of constitutional and institutional consequence.⁵⁵

The afterlife is visible not only in public reports but in internal governance correspondence. On June 13, 2023, I circulated a proposal titled Return to Self-Governance arguing that the consolidated court should demonstrate its capacity for self-rule by revising local rules through an internal committee process. Judge Bergin replied the same day that PCCJC’s “unique structure” under Administrative Order 2013-70 meant the superior-court presiding judge effectively occupied the chief administrative role for PCCJC and that internal trust problems had to be addressed before seeking self-governance. Judge Pesquiera then responded that she and Judge Cornejo had already submitted their own action plan and that Bergin would determine the direction and final outcome. I do not mention this thread because it revives the 2021 precinct proposal in literal form. I mention it because it shows that the underlying conflict over structural voice, internal authority, and the meaning of PCCJC self-government remained active two years later.⁵⁶

There is also a quieter afterlife visible in public administrative materials. The court’s later public website linked directly to Administrative Order 2024-220 and listed a superior-court liaison on the judges page, making visible to the public what the internal governance documents had long made clear: the court’s administrative identity remained deeply tied to superior-court-supervised centralized governance.⁵⁷ Likewise, the May 1, 2025 filing notice requiring new civil cases to identify a precinct suggests that the institution itself had moved, by the end of my term, to make territorial designation more explicit at the point of intake. These later developments do not settle every question from 2021. But they do show that the issues at stake - centralized administration, territorial office, and the practical meaning of precinct identity - remained live.

The afterlife became more concrete still after I left the bench. Administrative Order No. 2026-001, entered on February 4, 2026 in the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court, recited that an earlier May 12, 2025 order had reinstituted precinct filing and then went further. It directed that, in all case types, matters assigned to a specific precinct before August 1, 2025 remain there for the life of the case; in civil matters, a justice of the peace was not to transfer a case between precincts absent a motion from a party; and in criminal matters, judges were to address wrong-precinct assignments through hearings or notice-and-dismissal procedures. A March 24, 2026 email from Judge Laine McDonald then stated that the JPs had been instructed that their jurisdiction was only within their precinct for cases filed after August 1, 2025 and that precinct-specific out-of-custody arraignments would begin on May 4, 2026. By 2025 and 2026, then, the court had moved toward a more explicitly precinct-specific regime for both civil intake and criminal jurisdiction than the public managerial picture of 2021 had suggested.⁵⁸

This distinction also clarifies the state-governance record. As of April 19, 2026, I have not found a 2026 Arizona Supreme Court administrative order superseding AO 2024-220 on PCCJC governance. The latest statewide governance order I have located remains AO 2024-220. The newer 2026 development is local rather than statewide: PCCJC’s own AO 2026-001 implementing precinct filing within the still-existing superior-court-supervised structure.⁵⁹

My own retrospective language, of course, must be handled critically. In the Farewell Address I spoke of clearing the COVID backlog, forging partnerships, and resolving tens of thousands of cases without appellate reversal. Those are claims of self-understanding and institutional valuation. They are important because they show how I regarded the office at the close of service. But they should not be read as if they float free of rhetoric. The same is true, more intensely, of the Myers Report, which is openly critical in tone. A scholar of this episode should use those documents, but use them as later interpretive evidence rather than as neutral master keys.

Even with those cautions, I think the longer arc strengthens rather than weakens the significance of the 2021 dispute. The re-precincting controversy was not a passing administrative irritation. It exposed a fault line that continued to matter: how should a local judicial office understand itself when the administrative structure surrounding it grows more centralized, more data-driven, and more managerial, even as the office remains territorially elected and locally entrusted? That question did not disappear because one memo was answered or one hearing scheduled. It remained a defining question of service.

For future historians, that may be the archive’s most valuable gift. The papers do not preserve only a dispute over one proposal. They preserve the conceptual vocabulary by which the dispute was understood from inside the judicial office. They preserve words like “public trust,” “voice at the table,” “political purposes,” and “touchstone of jurisdiction.” Those phrases make it possible to write the history of the episode not just as institutional chronology, but as a contest over what local justice is for and how it should be publicly known.

Document Facsimile

I came to understand the re-precincting controversy as a struggle over truth in institutional form. County administration told one truthful story, but only one: filings had declined, JPCs were below their statutory ceiling, hearing officers and a pro tem carried some categories of work, the election calendar was unforgiving, and the Board possessed real legal authority to redraw precincts. Those were not invented facts. They were part of the truth.

But from chambers I believed there was another truth, equally real and more complete. The court emerging from the pandemic could not be understood by thin public metrics alone. Chambers work, remote hearings, judicial orientation, signature-file review, calendar complexity, programmatic interdependence, transfer burdens, and the democratic significance of precinct office all belonged to the institutional picture. Without them, the county’s public narrative risked converting a constitutional judicial office into an under-described managerial unit. That was why I opposed the proposal as it was then presented, while remaining open in principle to a better-grounded inquiry into future structural reform.

The controversy also taught me that local judicial politics is rarely reducible to a clean conflict between law and politics, or between neutral administration and aggrieved officeholders. It is more unruly than that. The dispute gathered within itself party history, electoral geography, public-record discipline, superior-court supervision, managerial spreadsheets, bench memory, and the practical burdens of running a high-volume non-record court. Maps were part of the argument. So were calendars, key-card logs, caseload tables, election deadlines, former legislators, former supervisors, and the lingering memory of a court already bruised by governance rupture. The politics of court structure lay precisely in that mixture.

For me, then, the episode was never only about JP5, JP6, or even the boundaries of the Pima County Consolidated Justice Court. It was about whether the institutional reality of local justice would be defined from the outside in or described from within in a way adequate to its complexity. It was about whether local judicial independence meant only freedom in particular rulings, or whether it also required some meaningful role in resisting administrative categories that misstate the work of the office. And it was about whether the precinct remained a living public form—territorial, democratic, and juridical—inside a consolidated court that often acted as though territory could be abstracted away.

Time sharpened the point rather than dissolving it. After I left office, the court moved toward a more precinct-specific regime in both filing and jurisdiction. That later turn does not prove that every argument I made in 2021 was correct in every detail. It does, however, show that the territorial question had never truly disappeared. The precinct was not a dead shell. It remained an operative form of legal identity and public administration, even inside a heavily centralized court.

That is why this episode belongs in the scholarship of judicial politics. It shows that the political life of courts is often hidden not in campaign slogans or headline constitutional clashes, but in the management of boundaries, workloads, calendars, and authority. It shows that in lower courts, maps and spreadsheets can function as constitutional instruments in all but name. And it shows that a justice of the peace who is never told how to decide a case may still find the office drawn into a profound struggle over how the institution is measured, narrated, and permitted to endure.

In the end, I did not regard the matter as a mere map fight because it was not one. It was a dispute over the administration of justice in one of its most practical and least romantic forms: who counts the work, who speaks for the court, and who decides whether a community’s judicial office still deserves to stand in the shape the law has given it. If this essay has a larger claim, it is that local courts are remembered or lost at exactly that level. When the work is misdescribed, the office is weakened before it is ever abolished. When the work is rendered visible with enough honesty and institutional care, the law keeps faith not only with doctrine, but with the public world in which doctrine must actually live.