Justice Consuelo Marie Callahan, Circuit Judge, United States Courts of Appeal [80:45-85:48]

of know where the other people are coming from but we still don't conference about the cases till after when we're all in court in court week and that's after oral argument and if you're the author of that particular opinion then you would then take into account the other bench memos that have been prepared by the other participating judges well we actually when we get a calendar if for a week we will have somewhere around 40 cases on calendar and we get it about eight weeks before we go to court and whoever is presiding makes assignments and so each chambers only does a third of the bench memos so we're not duplicating each other although all judges are going to read all the briefs they're going to do their internal work but so we don't duplicate that part of it that's a way that we sort of share pulling on the or to at least give that the other chambers a place to start that's very interesting and I do want to ask you more at the end about your work on the ninth circuit when you were on the court of appeal did you feel that that kind of work capitalized and all your best features and talents well I think eventually it as I became as I became competent in I think in doing a pellet work I think the other things that I had done rounded me out in a way that maybe someone that had only done a pellet work wouldn't have available so I think in an eventual sense I think I was really kind of the whole enchilada when I got there but when I but when I started I would have to say that you know I hadn't done you know I just hadn't done a pellet work so that was really my growth area so I think I think when I finally got to the point that I had I had competence in a pellet work that was the case and I think that the the state courts of appeal get are really good opportunity to develop your abilities and you don't do as much constitutional adjudication as say that you do in the federal court but you do a lot of statutory interpretation and so you get very you get a lot of seasoning and a lot of practice in terms of really putting to work how you think a court should do statutory interpretation what is the role of the court relative to the legislature or relative to the executive branch in terms of when you know when when does a court defer to judgments that are made by other branches of the government when is the court doing to know about work and how how much you're willing to dig in you know I found a difference in I think this goes to the difference in judicial philosophy sometimes that if you really are a plain meaning person when you do statutory construction you're not going to work too awfully hard to save the legislature when they do a crummy job when they're not really clear you're just going to say hey look or the plain language says this whether you mentored or not that's what you said and that's what it's going to be and if you didn't mean that then you're going to have to come back and correct it you have the capability to do that whereas I think some people are will go a little bit further in terms of trying to play cleanup for the legislature I didn't happen to fall into that category I think that they have a they've got a distinct function and I think that if they say it clearly then that's what it means if they obviously when it's not clear there are cannons of statutory construction that we can that we can go to that will sometimes resolve the issue of what they meant we can look at the entirety you know we can look to the legislative history if it's you know if it's a defendant you know the lenity cannon towards the defendant as far as that goes but you know sometimes at the end of the day it just is really poorly drafted and you can't figure out anything by it and so sometimes you just have to leave the legislature to correct what they didn't do correctly in the first place and it really while it may seem that someone might criticize you for saying you could have done more I look in the ultimate sense that it's really my respect for what that branch of government does and that they have the capability to easily say what they mean if they didn't say it clearly in in the first place do you have any advice on how a trial judge can improve or work on factors to become a good appellate justice I you know I think at any point in life that it's pretty much the same that anytime you come to a place that I think success there really doesn't always go to your skill set it goes to certain personal qualities that people have and I think to