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From Diversity Promises by Rush Another Nothing Burger? A Decade After Loretta Rush's Interview, Indiana's Judiciary Still Faces Many of the Same Questions
- Hoosier Enquirer Team
- 14 hours ago
- 3 min read
Nearly ten years ago, Indiana Chief Justice Loretta Rush sat down with Indiana Public Broadcasting's Brandon Smith and candidly acknowledged a problem.
Indiana's judiciary lacked diversity.
"It really isn't acceptable," Rush said in the 2017 interview, noting that nearly all of Indiana's Supreme Court justices throughout history had been white men. She spoke about pipeline programs, outreach efforts, increasing representation, and ensuring that Indiana's courts better reflected the people they serve.Agreed.
"Hoosier Enquirer continued investigations find that many of the concerns raised by attorneys over the past decade—including lawyer shortages, DEI, declining public confidence, concerns regarding judicial accountability, fraud in fake legal ethics prosecutions, entrapment, lack of due process, and allegations of excessive bureaucracy within the legal system—remain largely unresolved despite numerous studies, commissions, and reform initiatives."
At the time, her sincere comments were widely praised. The expectation was that meaningful reforms would follow and her insincere actions and near constant failures in an environment of her clear efforts for self-preservation only.
Several years later, however, many observers are asking an increasingly uncomfortable question: what exactly has changed?
The answer, critics argue, is surprisingly little. In an environment where Yes Men get paid and promoted and loyalty to the queen is the rule of law. The Queen being "Her Majesty Loretta Rush." Enough is enough.
Indiana still faces significant attorney shortages in many counties. Access to legal services remains difficult in rural communities. Public confidence in institutions continues to struggle, and concerns about transparency and accountability have hardly disappeared. Meanwhile, years of commissions, studies, task forces, pilot programs, and strategic initiatives have produced far fewer measurable results than many reform advocates had hoped.
Hoosier Enquirer investigations find that many of the issues acknowledged by judicial leaders years ago continue to exist today. Indeed, some attorneys privately contend that conditions have worsened in certain respects, particularly as experienced practitioners retire and fewer young lawyers choose small-town practice.
The recent Commission on Indiana's Legal Future appears to some critics to be another example of this pattern.
Created amid increasing concerns over attorney shortages and access to justice, the Commission itself represented an implicit acknowledgment that Indiana's legal system faces serious structural challenges. Yet one year after its final recommendations, much of the response appears to consist of what government institutions often do best: create additional committees to study existing problems.
The Commission recommended working groups, pilot programs, additional outreach efforts, mentorship initiatives, law school pipeline programs, technological studies, and continued oversight by various judicial entities. While none of these ideas are necessarily bad, critics question whether they amount to meaningful reform or merely the appearance of reform.
More importantly, critics note what was not addressed.
There was little discussion of whether the legal profession's increasing costs and regulatory burdens discourage lawyers from entering underserved areas. There was no major examination of judicial accountability systems or whether disciplinary concerns contribute to attorney attrition. There was little evidence of serious institutional self-examination regarding whether some of Indiana's legal leadership may have contributed to the very problems now being studied.
Questions surrounding judicial appointments have also continued to arise.
Critics frequently point to the appointment and later removal of Aaron Johnson from the Hamilton County bench as an example of why Indiana's appointment and vetting processes deserve closer scrutiny. While individual cases differ and reasonable minds may disagree about their significance, such episodes have fueled broader debates regarding transparency and accountability within judicial governance.
Ironically, despite years of discussions concerning diversity, critics increasingly argue that another type of diversity remains lacking: diversity of thought, background, and institutional perspective. They note that commissions are often populated by members of the same legal establishment that has governed Indiana's judicial system for years.
This does not necessarily mean those individuals acted improperly. But it does raise an obvious question: how likely are institutions to fundamentally reform themselves?
History suggests the answer is often: not very.
Thus, nearly ten years after acknowledging serious shortcomings and one year after the latest grand reform initiative, many Hoosiers may reasonably conclude that Indiana's legal establishment has become exceptionally proficient at studying problems, discussing problems, and issuing reports concerning problems.
Solving them, however, remains considerably more difficult.
The promises remain.
The committees remain.
The studies remain.
The shortages remain.
The concerns remain.
And meaningful reform, critics contend, remains somewhere over the horizon. so to speak.
For many observers, that increasingly resembles another familiar Indiana judicial product:
A grill ful of summer nothing burgers. Just another Rush nothing burger. "All but three of the 110 justices in Hoosier State history have been white men." But worse yet, both the non-white and white men are all Yes men. Even worse Indiana's first female Chief Justice.