When Chief Justice Monica Márquez steps to the bench, she carries both the weight of legal precedent and the responsibility of steering Colorado’s judicial branch through a period of transformation.
Under Colorado’s new term-based leadership system, Márquez balances her duties as a writing jurist with the administrative demands of her role as chief justice, which is term-limited at three years.
“The chief role is a whole second job on top of the day job,” Márquez said. She is constantly “trying to balance the workload and the urgency with which you have to handle so many of the administrative matters and trying to tuck in the researching and writing of opinions and so forth in and around all of that.”
Márquez leads across a pivotal structural moment. “We’ve had probably 50% of our bench turn over in the last five years,” she said. “We’ve had just tremendous influx of new blood in our court system statewide,” introducing diverse life experiences, a new level of tech-savviness and an energized culture shift branchwide.
Through her travels to every single judicial district in Colorado, a circuit Márquez is now repeating, she continues to be impressed by how mission-driven the court staff and probation officers are statewide, she said, noting “how committed everyone is to serving the people of Colorado and doing so fairly and impartially.”
An immediate challenge facing her administration is the logistics around virtual court proceedings. While Márquez champions video platforms as a crucial tool for expanding access to justice, the transition has introduced unexpected difficulties related to court decorum. Trial judges, for example, have encountered courtroom disruptors who hijack courtroom video streams with hate-filled content.
Another downside of virtual court proceedings is the “proliferation of folks who are illegally recording those proceedings and then posting snippets of them on YouTube and TikTok and overlaying them with negative commentary,” she said.
Despite these hurdles, the responsibility of the work keeps Márquez in a “state of awe,” she added, as she works to ensure the justice system benefits all Coloradans.