Noteworthy > PEOPLE James C. Turk’s Life of Work and Meaning by Clifford Weckstein Judge James C. Turk was an extraordi-nary person — and not only because he continued to come to work nearly every day when he was 91 years old and would have been paid just as much to stay home. He loved coming to work. He loved his job. And his job, as he saw it, was to do justice, every day and in every way. From his first days on the bench to his last, he had little patience for rules and procedures when — as he saw it in any particular case over which he was pre-siding — those rules or procedures might get in the way of doing justice. On those occasions when Judge Turk and the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed — that is, when the Fourth Circuit reversed him — it was usually because the judge had concluded that some statute or rule of procedure would impair his ability to do justice, and that the statute or rule therefore must yield. He was blazingly smart. I’m not sure that some of the lawyers practic-ing in front of him knew how quick his mind was. He could see where a trial was heading — or where a lawyer’s strategy was going to take her — well before anyone else in the courtroom. The law gives federal judges consider-able latitude in questioning witnesses and even commenting on the evidence, and Judge Turk availed himself of that latitude. Lawyers who practiced before him lived in fear that the judge’s questions were going to torpedo their cases, but at the end of the day, I don’t know that anyone ever thought that his questions were, objectively, unfair or over the line. 30 VIRGINIA LAWYER | August 2014 | Vol. 63 Judge Turk had a deep and abiding faith in God and in the perfectibility of man. He gave a lot of people second — and sometimes third and fourth — chances that other judges probably wouldn’t have. But I think that the historical record would show that he was right a lot more frequently than he was wrong in those sentencing decisions, and that there are a lot of people who today are productive citizens because Judge Turk saw that possibility in them when pretty much no one else did. He was from a different time, this member of the Greatest Generation. He came from a time when hard work and integrity were a given. He came from a time when even boys trying to project tough-ness in the depression-era Garden City Elementary School knew better than to speak of someone discourteously — and Judge Turk had no tolerance for incivil-ity in the courtroom. Studs Terkel was another member of that generation, born roughly a decade before Judge Turk. In his book “Working,” Terkel said that, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than tor-por; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” It was that attitude that kept Jim Turk on the bench, trying to do justice, at age 91. Clifford Weckstein is a circuit court judge for the 23rd Judicial Circuit, which includes Roanoke, Roanoke County, and Salem. roanoke.com www.vsb.org photo courtesy of The Roanoke Times