The Western Slope is roughly a third of Colorado. It holds the headwaters of the Colorado River system, the federal land that covers most of its counties, and a disproportionate share of the state’s energy, water and agriculture. What it does not hold, and has almost never held, is a seat on the courts that have the last word on its law. Colorado’s appellate bench lives east of the Continental Divide. 

This is not a complaint about symbols. A court’s judgments fall hardest on the people who must live beneath them, and an appellate court’s fall on the whole state at once, binding every county to one reading of the law. Authority such a court holds by appointment; legitimacy it earns, in part, by being recognizable to the people it governs. The court’s own incoming leader has said as much. At a Colorado Bar Association gathering in May, Ted C. Tow III, who becomes chief judge of the Court of Appeals this summer, put it without hedging: “We don’t have a rural perspective on our court.” 

The federal judiciary reached the same conclusion and acted on it. In March 2023, the U.S. Senate confirmed Gordon Gallagher to a lifetime seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, the first appointee to that bench from the Western Slope in more than three decades and the first federal district judge in the state’s history stationed outside Denver. He sits in the Wayne Aspinall Federal Building in Grand Junction. The federal courts looked at the map and decided the bench should reflect it in fact, not in theory. Dan Rubinstein, Mesa County’s Republican district attorney, supported a judge nominated by a Democratic president. Some things are too important for partisanship. 

The recognition is not confined to the courts, and it belongs to no single party. One candidate for attorney general, a Front Range prosecutor, told a Grand Junction audience last year that of the roughly 400 lawyers in the attorney general’s office, 399 work in metro Denver and one in La Plata County, and that a Western Slope regional office would be a priority. The observation travels intact from the executive’s lawyers to the judiciary’s judges: a statewide institution that exists entirely in one corner of the state will, in time, come to see the state from that corner. 

The numbers tell the rest without much help. The Court of Appeals seats 22 judges; the Supreme Court, seven. Western Slope representation on either bench has been so concentrated in individuals, and at times in families, that a single retirement nearly empties it. Chief Justice Monica Márquez grew up in Grand Junction; her father, Jose D.L. Márquez, a Grand Junction lawyer, was the first Hispanic judge on the Colorado Court of Appeals. The last judge to reach the Court of Appeals on the strength of a Western Slope practice was James Casebolt, who joined it in 1994 after roughly two decades practicing in Grand Junction and retired in 2015. No judge with comparable roots has taken his place. A bench that one retirement can empty of an entire region was thin in that region to begin with. 

The caseload does not thin out to match. The Western Slope generates a distinctive body of law: water rights and their administration, federal land and the uses permitted on it, energy development and the rules that constrain it, the disputes of agriculture and grazing across a checkerboard of private, state and federal ground. It is the ordinary legal life of a third of the state, decided almost entirely by judges whose careers unfolded on the other side of the Divide. 

Why this persists is no mystery, and naming the mechanism is more useful than lamenting the result. Colorado fills its appellate seats by assisted appointment. When a vacancy opens on the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court Nominating Commission screens the applicants and certifies three names to the governor, who must choose one. Trial judges are tied to the districts they serve and must live in them. Appellate judges are tied to nothing. The whole state is a single pool, fed by an appellate bar that is overwhelmingly a Denver bar. The commission itself is organized by congressional district, an arrangement that folds the entire Western Slope into one enormous district and gives no assurance any nominee will come from west of it. Geographic representation appears nowhere among the criteria the commission is directed to weigh. The result is not a conspiracy. It is a machine doing what it was built to do: finding able lawyers without reference to where they live. 

The pattern reaches the case law itself. Rubinstein, the same prosecutor who backed Gallagher’s appointment, recalls the 2012 case of a defendant named Julius Sutton, who asked a Western Slope trial court to keep evidence of a firearm sale away from his jury. The judge let it in. He found nothing unfairly prejudicial in the sale of a gun, treating it as the ordinary transaction it is in a place where firearms change hands the way they have for generations and a rifle is nearer to a tool than a statement. The Court of Appeals, reading the same record from Denver, found the sale alarming enough to require reversal. The law the two courts applied was identical. What differed was the world each took for granted. 

Sutton is not an isolated grievance; it sits inside a longer pattern. Wolves were returned to Western Slope ranches by a 2020 ballot measure so narrow that Denver and Boulder counties alone supplied the margin. Air-quality rules drawn for a Front Range ozone problem were applied to Western Slope geography over the operators’ documented objections. And this spring the sentence of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, convicted by a Mesa County jury and affirmed on appeal, was set aside by executive commutation while both sides were still bound for the Supreme Court. The point is not to relitigate any of them but to notice the accumulation. When the decisions that bind a place are made, again and again, by people who do not live there, the place stops trusting that the process is its own. 

The same imbalance is about to be tested again, in this very forum. The Shoshone right, among the most senior on the Colorado River, is being purchased so that its water stays in the river; 18 Western Slope counties have put up tens of millions of their own dollars to make it happen, and the largest Front Range providers have lined up in opposition. The dispute will be resolved in water court, whose decisions can be appealed to the Colorado Supreme Court. When it arrives there, it will be heard by the same seven justices, drawn from the same side of the Divide. That is not a prediction that the case will be decided wrongly. It is an observation about who will be in the room when it is decided. 

None of this asserts that the Western Slope is owed power, or outcomes, or deference. It asks only that the Western Slope be granted presence, and two things would supply it. The first is immediate and within reach. A seat on the Court of Appeals is opening now; Chief Judge Gilbert Román leaves the court this year, and his vacancy, with others sure to follow, gives the governor and the commission the chance to do for the state’s bench what the federal system did for its own: seat a judge who lives and practices on the Western Slope. The second is structural and more lasting. Geographic representation should become an express, on-the-record consideration in the appellate nominating process, weighed beside the criteria the commission already applies, with the commission asked to say plainly when no candidate from west of the Divide advances, and why. That is not a quota. Trial-court selection already honors geography as a matter of course. The proposal asks only that the appellate process stop pretending geography does not exist. 

A court need not be a mirror of the state to be fair to it. But a court that has not, in living memory, included a voice formed by the country west of the Divide is harder for that country to recognize as its own, and a justice system survives on being recognized. The whole state is bound by what these courts decide. The whole state ought to be able to find itself, somewhere, among the people deciding. 

Todd M. Starr has served as county attorney in five western Colorado counties over more than 25 years, including his current role as Mesa County attorney, and serves on the board of the International Municipal Lawyers Association. In addition, Starr has maintained a national litigation practice. The views expressed are solely his own.