The program descriptions, case statistics, and the linkage of our appropriation requests to future judicial challenges are comprehensively set forth in the narrative we submit to the Legislature. It is important reading and I will make available copies of it for those whom I disappoint by not using it as the subject of my remarks today. For this noon, I choose to speak not of budgets but of beliefs. I'm preaching today. Yet for the moment I invite you to think of it in exactly that way.
Boundaries are the defining attribute of a geographical state.
A half century ago, the inability of a lawyer or a judge to define what constituted a cognizable case, the procedures to be followed, and the relief to be granted said much more about the lack of preparation of lawyer or judge than it did about the lack of precision in judicial boundaries. When I was 16, I accompanied my father on a trip from Vermont back to the California ranch on which he had been raised. It was his first return to the San Fernando Valley since his youth. He remembered a bunk house near a pristine lake, surrounded by 5000 acres of rolling hills and green valleys. And just as an explanation of what had brought about the extraordinary alterations to the California landscape would have required a comprehensive examination of nothing less than the changes in modern American society, so too would an explanation of why the state of the judiciary in Vermont in 2001 looks so different than 1951 require a perspective that those of us living through the changes cannot fully have.