KK: Great. Not going to follow Chief
Justice Amestoy to Harvard?
JB: No. You know he has written a book
he is going to get published. A book on
Richard Henry Dana. I don’t know if you
have ever read Two Years Before the Mast?
I didn’t know this about him, but afterwards he became one of the country’s premier maritime lawyers. He was included by
the Lincoln administration. They were losing a case at the Supreme Court about
seizing British ships running the blockade
from the Confederacy and one of the Supreme Court justices contacted the attorney general and said, “If you don’t want
to lose this case, you better get a different lawyer. Because you are losing.” I guess
things were a little looser in those days. But
anyways he has written a book and expects
to have it published this fall by Harvard University Press.
KK: We are here primarily because we
have the centennial of the Workers’ Compensation Act. How have you seen the
Workers’ Compensation Act change over
time from your role as commissioner, to trial judge, to Supreme Court?
JB: When I was there, there was not
much emphasis, if any at all, on vocational rehab. Of course it was in the statute,
but it seemed to be a stepchild of everything else. I think we put in the first regulation encouraging the insurers to get into
voc rehab so these guys were not on disability indefinitely. I know it was sort of a
new direction at the time. Whether that has
been successful or not, I just don’t know.
Another tale was, at the time we were
there, there was a broad range of charges
by chiropractors, and there seemed to be
no standards about what was a reasonable
charge for whatever service an injured employee was getting. They went all over the
place and the insurance companies were
looking for something. So I remember we
tried to get together with a group of chiropractors to establish some kind of a scale. I
think it turned out that it would have been
an antitrust violation, so we dropped that
effort. I also recall that we’d go to these
other states and their bureaucracy was so
much more involved than ours. And when I
became commissioner, I took on Mark Stewww.vtbar.org
Interview with Justice Brian Burgess
you get rusty. Just like I got rusty not being
on the trial bench and I would go back from
time to time during the budget crunches.
Justice Skoglund and I would go back to
the trial bench and try to fill in there, so
they didn’t have to hire an extra judge.
I liked doing it, but you look at the transcripts afterwards and say, “Hmm, I was a
little rusty on that one.” I’m off these days.
We are trying get a sailboat and work on
other stuff. We have a grand daughter to
play with.
phen as deputy and basically we had the
deputy and the hearing officer and the
two people reviewing the claims. That was
it. We were processing 8,000 to 12,000
claims per year and we were getting them
all done. These other states would have a
much larger bureaucracy than ours. I remember at some conference I made some
sort of an a