HAMPTON, Va. — Slowly but surely, the number of women judges in Virginia courtrooms is on the rise.
Nearly a third of Virginia jurists — or 32% — are female, up from 19% in 2008, according to the National Association for Women Judges.
Hampton General District Court is a case in point: All three judges — Corry N. Smith, Selena Stellute Glenn and Tonya Henderson-Stith — are women.
In fact, that court was ahead of its time: When Glenn landed the job four years ago, Hampton General District become the first multi-judge courthouse in the state with an all-female bench. Now, other courthouses are joining in.
The Henrico County Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court, with five judges, became an all-women operation in July.
Three of the four judges at Chesapeake General District Court are women. There are a couple of smaller multi-courthouse districts operated entirely by females.
That Hampton General District Court has all women judges has had a tangible impact on the way the system operates, some local lawyers say.
“Oh my gosh, yes,” Hampton attorney Michele Barnette Cavanaugh said when asked if she’s seen a difference. “I think it’s run way more efficiently. The parties that come in there — we’re in and out. There’s no sitting around time.”
The judges say they work together well, having robust communication designed to keep justice moving.
“We are a team,” Glenn said. “We are constantly checking on each other to see if we can transfer cases to each other’s courtrooms so that we can efficiently finish our dockets.”
More efficient dockets, she said, means “attorneys, litigants and law enforcement officers are not waiting for hours for their case to be called.”
Smith said collegial weekly meetings among the three Hampton judges have been crucial to keeping things running smoothly.
“We try at least once a week to just get together and catch up with each other,” she said. “Maybe something weird happened in court, and we pick each other’s brains — this was the fact pattern, and this was the argument, and this was my ruling, what do you think?”
The free-ranging conversations, Smith said, run the gamut from streamlining clerk’s office operations to making tweaks to dockets to “what’s going on in each other’s lives.”
According to a Daily Press tabulation of statewide judicial rosters, Virginia now has 146 sitting women judges, or 32% of the 453 total judges statewide.
That rate is just shy of the national average. Across the country, 34% of judges are women, up from 25% in 2008, according to the National Association of Women Judges.
Two of the Virginia Supreme Court’s seven justices are female, accounting for 29% of the high court. Seven women sit at the Virginia Court of Appeals, or 41% of that 17-member bench.
But women are far less represented in Virginia’s trial courts of record, where all felony and larger civil cases are concluded. Of 170 judges in Virginia’s Circuit Courts, only 19% — or 32 — are women.
Meanwhile, women account for 33% of jurists at General District Courts, which hear criminal misdemeanors, traffic and smaller civil cases, as well as felony probable cause hearings.
But women make up nearly half — or 48% — of judges at Juvenile and Domestic Relations Courts statewide. Those are courts involving children and family matters.
The increase in female judges stems in part from a larger applicant pool: While women made up only 8% of attorneys nationwide in 1980, they now make up more than half of all practicing lawyers in the United States.
Though the full Virginia General Assembly votes on judges, a longstanding tradition gives local lawmakers great deference in making the picks.
And Del. Mike Mullin, D-Newport News, said it only makes sense that women are gaining judicial seats.
“For too long, women in the commonwealth have been excluded from being judges,” Mullin said. “I’m glad to see that there is growing parity between men and women on the bench.”
Given that “the general trajectory is towards more women as lawyers, I think it’s high time the bench reflects the bar.”
When asked about the fact that only 19% of Circuit Court judges statewide are women, Mullin said “there’s always more work to be done to make sure we have benches that are reflective of our communities.”
Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, who serves on the Senate Courts of Justice Committee, said the trend is driven by more female lawyers being “of the age when people want to become judges.”
“People usually aren’t considered for the bench until they’ve been practicing for at least 10, 15, 20 years,” he said. “And so we just have a much, much larger pool of women that are available now.”
Surovell said he and others in the Fairfax delegation have worked hard to achieve more “gender balance” there. “A diversity of life experiences” is important on the bench, he said, including “female life experience.”
At Hampton General District, several local attorneys say the all-women bench allows litigants to “feel heard” even when they lose a case.
Local attorney Matt Ballard said that while the city has a long-standing legacy for judicial fairness, “certainly with these three, if you’re a defendant, you’re going to get a fair shake.”
“All three of them seem to have the type of life experience where they’re fair-minded, and they can relate to ordinary people,” he said. (He doesn’t practice before Glenn because she’s his sister-in-law).
In traffic court, where many people aren’t represented by a lawyer, “all three of the judges take their time to explain things and make certain people understand what’s going on,” Ballard said.
“I‘ve never seen any of the three of them lose their patience with somebody,” he added.
Longtime local defense attorney J. Ashton Wray Jr. said he finds the female judges on the Peninsula to be “excellent,” saying they “offer a different point of view.”
“They are well-prepared, they’re cognizant of the law, and I find that they’re sensitive to people’s circumstances when there are circumstances,” Wray said. “That’s been refreshing for me, candidly. ... I find female judges are often very willing to listen to what the explanations are.”
Local defense attorney Timothy Clancy, on the other hand, said the all-women bench at Hampton General District hasn’t made any noticeable difference in either direction.
“It’s just not that big a deal,” he said. “It’s interesting, but I’m aware of no discernible effect on justice in the City of Hampton.”
But that’s a good thing, Clancy said. “I’ve always hoped and dreamed” of the day when such things as a judge’s sex or race “is not an issue and not even a concern.”
In Hampton, while Smith said she and her two fellow jurists have ramped up their communication, “I don’t think there’s any difference” in how justice is rendered now versus the old days.
“I always joke that we just smell better than the courthouses where it’s all men,” she quipped. “We decorate and we smell better.”
It’s true that some of the courthouse’s judicial chambers — a fancy phrase for the judges’ offices — are looking a little less shabby these days.
When Glenn assumed her new chambers in 2018, the room sorely needed new paint and a new desk to replace the bamboo-style wallpaper and creaking desk original to the building’s 1991 inception.
But Glenn said she updated the office — with light “seafoam green” paint, a mahogany-colored desk and a new carpet — largely because she didn’t want visitors to feel the “void” of the well-liked man she replaced: Judge Albert “Pat” Patrick III, a longtime judge who died unexpectedly in 2017.
The renovation, she said, “was for other people not to feel so sad when they came back to the exact same room the way he left it — except it was me sitting there.”
But Glenn hung a picture of Patrick in her office, saying she strives to attain his kind and patient demeanor.
“I hope litigants leave my courtroom feeling they have been heard and have been given a fair day in court,” she said.
Smith, meantime, has a sign in her chambers that says, “What Would Judge Patrick Do?” near an action figure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Smith and Glenn are each the daughter of prominent Hampton lawyers. Smith’s father is criminal defense attorney Ron Smith, while Glenn is the daughter of Joseph Stellute, a longtime lawyer who died in early October. Henderson-Stith declined to be interviewed.
“We have three awesome judges,” Cavanaugh said.. “Our girls are the best.”
