You Got Schooled

The most hated judge in Kansas considers his words for a moment and then says, "I don't know how to say this without sounding arrogant, and I don't mean it that way."

But to hell with appearances. Judge Terry Bullock knows full well what led him to the hot seat he now finds himself in. "There are people who have perfect pitch, and they're meant to become singers," he says, explaining what motivated him to seek the bench in the first place. "There are people who are quick and coordinated, and they make great athletes. I've always believed that my knack, my little niche, if you will, is to listen to a lot of stuff and very quickly find the peanut and figure out what to do.

"In short, it's what I'm good at," he says. "And I'm sure you can get a different opinion on that."

Yes, you can. And you don't have to look far.

Since Bullock declared on December 2 that the inadequate and unequal public funding of Kansas schools violates the state's constitution -- and gave lawmakers until July 1 to fix the system, suggesting that it might take $1 billion to do it right -- he's become a pariah to politicians and pundits across the state.

"Why is a judge doing this?" local conservative commentator Jack Cashill asked on a recent edition of Kansas City Week in Review. "He might as well tell the Legislature to add gay marriage [to the state constitution] and take out the Pledge of Allegiance while he's at it. At some point, people somewhere have got to say, 'No. We're not going to listen to that judge.'"

"Increasingly, we're seeing judges think that they can do it best," state Attorney General Phill Kline told the Associated Press last December. "We're getting courts that are forwarding their policy decisions rather than taking a look at the constitution. It provides for what is in political science terms an oligarchy, what I call a monarchy by committee."

And the carping hasn't come just from the Right. Governor Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat, told the Wichita Eagle last month: "For taxpayers, that can be a very dangerous proposal to have a court essentially make decisions based not on knowing the situation or having responsibility for raising taxes, but just making mandates that shut down the schools unless you come up with a certain funding amount."

For all the bluster, you'd think Bullock was a Supreme Court justice with a legacy complex.

He's really just an ordinary county judge holding court in the Shawnee District Court in downtown Topeka, meting out justice in cases involving personal injuries, medical malpractice and business deals gone bad.

But because his courtroom is in the state's capital, it's the first stop for all lawsuits against the state itself.

And Bullock likes being right where he is. He says a state Supreme Court appointment, with its endless schedule of poring over briefs and writing opinions, would probably just bore him. He'd miss the drama of county court and the procession of litigants coming before him with problems large and small.

"I come down here every day, and I almost never do what I plan," he tells the Pitch.

On a typical Monday morning, he convenes a pretrial meeting in a conference room adjacent to his office. Seated before him are two men, one a lawyer in a suit, the other a nonlawyer who has shown up on behalf of his mother, who is deep in debt to the company the lawyer represents. It's a mundane case, but it has much in common with the school finance squabble. Like every lawsuit, it's about people struggling to agree on the right course of action.

Bullock is dressed casually in a blue sweater and department-store khakis. He takes off his glasses and gently informs the man that he can't represent his mother; only a lawyer can do so. "But I'm being lenient today because there's a snowstorm and your mother is not well," he says.

The meeting lasts just a few minutes, long enough for a hearing in April to be scheduled, one Bullock hopes will never occur. On his way out the door, he tells the men in a polite, country way, "You can stay in here for as long as you want and work it out. There's coffee if you want it. And there's coffee if you don't want it."

At his desk a few minutes later, Bullock says, "Everything works out better when folks have a hand in crafting the solution, as opposed to just having things imposed on them."

He'd prefer that people figure things out on their own.

"Every time the litigation goes on in my courtroom, I consider it a defeat," he says. "When I have to put on the robe and sit for days, I'm thinking, Where did we go wrong?"

That's exactly what Bullock was thinking last October, when for eight days, he heard testimony from the state's educators about the sad state of Kansas public schools. He responded with a ninety-page preliminary order that's caused a furor throughout the state.