Michael D. Zimmerman was elected chief justice of the Utah Supreme Court on Tuesday in a unanimous vote of fellow court members.
Zimmerman will replace Chief Justice Gordon Hall, who will retire from the court at the end of this month. Unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, where the president picks the chief justice, Utah law says the justices themselves will elect their chief. Zimmerman will serve a four-year term. Hall didn't participate in the vote, so four of the five justices picked Zim-mer-man.In a related matter, Gov. Mike Leavitt's office said Tuesday that Leavitt hopes the judge he has nominated to replace Hall, Appeals Court Justice Leonard Russon, will be confirmed by the Utah Senate.
Leavitt and a number of senators say the current nominating process should be changed. But Leavitt spokeswoman Vicki Varela says the governor wants to see Russon confirmed and then deal with the problem of changing the system.
Much of the criticism of the nominating process so far has come from Leavitt, a Republican, and GOP leaders in the Senate. That's led some Democratic senators to say changes should be made carefully. Senate Minority Leader Scott Howell, D-Sandy, says Republicans already control the executive and legislative branches of government and shouldn't have undue influence in the judicial branch as well.
However, when the late Gov. Scott M. Matheson, a Democrat, was governor in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of Republican senators complained then that the Democratic governor - a former lawyer himself - was having too much influence on the make-up of the state's judiciary.
Zimmerman was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1984 by Matheson. Zimmerman has written a number of important decisions over the years, his latest being what attorneys call a precedent-setting decision just two weeks ago on prayer in public government meetings.
That far-ranging decision will probably protect reasonable acts of religious or quasi-religious observances - like a prayer at a public meeting or the singing of Christmas carols by a high school choir - for years to come and probably negates the need for a major overhaul of the Utah Constitution's section on separation of church and state, legal experts say.
Zimmerman's election as chief justice probably means he will stay on the court for the foreseeable future. In recent years there's been some speculation that Zimmer-man, 50, may leave the relatively underpaid profession of a Utah judge for greener fields of private law practice. Several years ago, Zimmerman told applicants to his yearly clerkship that he might not return, but he ultimately did stay on.
Zimmerman was born in Chicago, where he receive most of his schooling. When he was in high school, his family moved to Phoenix. He attended the University of Arizona and Arizona State University before transferring to the University of Utah in 1964. He finished his undergraduate degree at the U. and attended the University of Utah Law School, graduating first in his class in 1969.
He was law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren E. Burger for a year.