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My personal concerns abo ut th e actual pr actice of law in a large firm effectively became moot in 1986, how ever, when I was appointed ajudge of the United States Distri ct Court for the Di strict of Massachuset ts. Explaining ho w such an appointm ent comes abo ut tends to invol ve th e reco untin g of int ricate and idiosyncratic detail bar ely of interest even to one's family. It is sufficient for pr esent purposes to say that the stars seemed to be in alignm ent for me when a vacancy arose and, despite a singular lack of partisan political involv ement at any time in my career, I emerged as the nominee without any particular controversy. I now cannot imagine being int ereste d in any other job and am certain that I will spend the rest of my work days as a trial judge. It satisfies the inter ests that drew me into j ourn alism; as I told a former newspaper colleague, "I used to spend time looking for stories, no w people bring their storie s to me." It keeps me in the trial courtroo m, the one work place I have found endlessly inte resting. It challenges my intellectua l capacities and engages my intere sts with its demands for personal resear ch, and writing and for fact-finding and careful synthetic rea- soning. It provides the opportunity in diverse cases to crystallize th e moral sentiments of the community. Life tenure as a jud ge provides an extraor dinary degree of independence, but it carries a correlative obligation. Th e opportunities for largely imp erceptible but no less per vasive arbitrariness or for undetected indol en t sup erfi ciality are manifold. Only cont inual self-exami nation and an abidin g sense of disciplined duty to leave every one w ho app ears before you with the sense-and to satisfy yourself - that you have given full and fair consi derat ion to w hat they have to say can prevent abuse of the judi cial office. Justi ce Souter, in his Supreme Court confirmat ion hearing testimony, put his finger on the criti cal issue as a mat ter of substance when talking about th e important lessons he had learned as a trial judg e: "if we are going to be trial jud ges, whose rulings will affect the lives of other peopl e and who are going to change their lives by w hat we do, we had better use every power of our m1nd and our heart s and our beings to get those rulings right." That is not because what a judge does is always or even frequen tly earth- shattering bu t because it affects tho se touched by the jud gme nt profo und ly. In th at sense, the apparent fairness of the pro cess and the demeanor of the judge may be even more impor- tant than the sub stance of the j udgment. Cur tis Bok made the point with great passion: The secre t of a jud ge's work is that ninety -nine percent of it is with trivial matters, and that non e of them will shake the cosmos very much. But they are apt to shake the liti gants grave ly...for gover nm en t touc hes them mor e percepti bly in the cour troom th an at any other point in their lives ... Show me an impatient judge and I will call him a pu blic nuisance to his face. Let him be quick ifh e must be, but not un concern ed, ever. Worse thanjudi ~ cial error is it to mishandle impatiently the sma ll affairs of momentarily helpless people, and judges shou ld be impeache d for it.