Current Issues Facing Our Courts

By Guest Columnist Justice Maura Corrigan, Michigan Supreme Court Justice

I welcome the chance to inform you about issues in the courts. Our Supreme Court has been praised as a "judicial point of light" [Washington Examiner] and as the "finest Supreme Court" in the nation [Wall Street Journal]. But Michigan itself is stuck in a "single-state recession." As Thomas Friedman wrote in The World if Flat, our world has radically changed. Jobs can be performed almost anywhere, thanks to technology. How will Michigan survive, especially in the face of a massive shift away from marriage? Social Scientist James Q. Wilson described what's happening in his book The Marriage Problem: marriage is no longer an institution, it's an option.

We witness this crisis every day in our family courts. We have an explosion of filings. Today, two-thirds of all of our new circuit court cases result from teh breakdown of the family.

Consider our data from 2005 against our 1966 data. Forty years ago, when the population was slightly less, 86,000 cases were filed in the circuit courts. Since 1966, our circuit court filings have quadrupled to 331,000 last year.

What is happening? In 1950, only 12 out of 100 children were born into broken familie. Four of those twelve were born out of wedlock, while eight of those twelve had parents who divorced. In 2000, that number rose to 60 our of 100 children. That is, 33 out of 100 were born out of wedlock and 27 out of 100 had parents who divorced. Today, an American child who has married parents is in the minority. This change in values and lifestyle makes work for the courts and costs taxpayers money.

Michigan now has more than one million child support cases in the courts. One-third of judges have an open child support case. Moreover, fully half of these cases involve children who were born outside marriage.

We have a huge problem! In forty years, we have moved form a culture of marriage, to a culture of divorce, to a culture of cohabitation and one-night stands. Professor Wilson captured the problem: "Whereas marriage was once thought to be about a social union, it is now about personal preferences." So if "personal preference" is the buzz word, where are we going?

Sadly, huge numbers of us are poor. Medicaid today pays for one-half of the births in Michigan. National data shows that, as of 2002, families with a female head of household accounted for half the families living in poverty. Four times as many single-parent families live in poverty as live in intact married families.

We have a significant decline in two-parent families, and children are the most obvious victims. The forces affecting us seem beyond the power of government to control. But these broken families, or nonfamilies, are utilizing court and social service resources - taxpayer resources - at an astonishing rate.

What do we do about it? I don't know the solution. But I know it's not enough to deal with the fallout of this cultural catastrophe. We must talk about what is happening to us, whether or not we can agree on the solution. Silence is something we cannot afford. We have no other choice if our democratic society is to survive.

May God bless CTV and God bless America!

- Michigan Supreme Court Justice Maura Corrigan

Justice Maura Corrigan currently serves the Michigan Supreme Court after being elected in 1998. She served two terms as Chief Justice from 2001-2004 and is up for re-election on November 7, 2006.

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