Vermont Bar Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 Vermont Bar Journal, Spring 2017, Volume 43, No. 1 | Page 38
III
rector and two as Deputy.
TC: You were also a U.S. Magistrates?
JD: Yes, but U.S. Magistrate was not the
position that it is today. It started as some-
thing called the Commissioner and they
were always appointees of the federal judg-
es. In those days, it was primarily low level
criminal cases, setting bail on illegal entries,
holding probable cause hearings, and oc-
casionally trials. The most interesting trial
case that I ever did, involved a gentleman
who was alleged to and was convicted of
taking an illegal duck in the federal wildlife
reserve. The U.S. Magistrate position then
was a few hours a week at most, unless you
happened to get an interesting duck case.
TC: I’ll have to get the citation to that
case! What did you do next?
JD: Let’s see, a variety of things for a
while. Mostly, I worked for Legal Services
Corporation and so I was in Washington ev-
ery week for a period of time. My wife got
a master’s degree in social work at West
Virginia University and we lived in Morgan-
town, West Virginia. Then I became Legal
Counsel to Governor Kunin, before I be-
came her Secretary of Administration from
1985 – 1987.
TC: That must have given you a good
taste for working with the Legislature.
What did you enjoy the most about that ex-
perience?
JD: The Secretary of Administration is
an interesting job; it’s a very close working
relationship with the Governor. At times,
the Secretary of Administration is involved
in the decision-making on everything, abso-
lutely everything, and you have an average
of three minutes to do whatever needs to
be done. Legislative sessions were the most
interesting times. It was crazy, I mean you
just worked 7 days a week and you were
going, going, going the whole time.
TC: What was the big topic in the Legis-
lature then?
JD: Educational financing was very big
during my time. A number of environmen-
tal initiatives were also big. I would have
to get into them because the Secretary of
Administration is the Secretary of Money,
so anything that involved money, whether
it’s the budget or financing particular pro-
grams, or coming up with a financing de-
vice for some new initiative or whatever, I
was involved. The biggest fights were for
educational financing, but they almost al-
ways are.
TC: The more things change, the more
they remain the same?
JD: Exactly.
TC: When did you become interested in
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serving on the Vermont Supreme Court?
JD: It’s hard to know the answer to that
question. I would have stayed being Sec-
retary of Administration for maybe anoth-
er term, but I was very heavily recruited by
Fred Allen, then Chief Justice of the Su-
preme Court. I had been the Rules Report-
er for some time, and was working with the
Supreme Court Justices all the time in that
capacity.
TC: So you were Kinvin Wroth?
JD: Yes, and Kinvin was actually working
with our rules committees at that time, so
we worked together on a number of things.
TC: What has been the biggest change
on the Supreme Court since you first start-
ed in 1987?
JD: Well, as you know very well, the Su-
preme Court is responsible for its own func-
tioning, and is responsible for the function-
ing of the Judiciary in general. I used to
know how many cases the backlog was in
the first year I came. What happened af-
ter that may have been before you came to
Vermont, I don’t know.
TC: I came in ‘82.
JD: Yes, so you were here. What hap-
pened is as a result of the controversy in
relation to Jane Wheel, Assistant Judge in
Chittenden County. There were mass dis-
qualifications, and the Court had a real
large backlog as a result. We were doing a
week of argument every month and so you
were picking up cases at a higher, much
higher, rate than what we’re currently do-
ing. I spent my commuting time listening to
arguments on my cassette player. I can’t re-
member exactly how big it got, but I prob-
ably had a backlog of 50 cases.
TC: Wow.
JD: Right.
TC: You were missing your