Justice Lyn Stuart of Bay Minette has been a judge in Alabama for almost three decades and was named on May 6 to the highest position in the court system in Alabama: acting chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Stuart was so named because she is the senior of the associate justices.

“I’ve been there the longest, and I’ve been there the longest by four years,” she said.

Stuart is in her 16th year as an associate justice.

So what responsibilities does Stuart have in this position?

“You have administrative responsibilities within the supreme court,” Stuart explained. “The larger thing is the administrative position of the entire court system.”

Stuart said as an associate justice you don’t have any administrative responsibilities. She is now supervising all employees, preparing budget requests and dealing with issues that come up like overtime pay; the list is endless.

Right now, Stuart plans to make limited changes.

“At this point the chief justice (Roy Moore) still has his (pending) appeal, so how long I’ll be doing this is uncertain,” she said. “So, yes, there will be some changes but they probably won’t be — for the most part — huge changes.”

The change to acting chief justice, Stuart says, does have its challenges.

“It’s a larger amount of work for the entire Supreme Court, so we had to sort of reorganize the way we do our work,” she said. “We did that the very next week and that’s worked pretty well. As far as the administrative office of the courts, which is the trial courts, just trying to learn everything … because there’s so much going on, so many issues they address.”

The major challenge is trying to meet the various needs of the trial courts.

“We do continuing judicial education and continuing education for all our employees, whether they’re a probation officer or court specialists,” she said. “All summer long there were all kinds of conferences, and I couldn’t attend them all, but I attended as many as I could.”

Associate justices don’t have to live in Montgomery, and Stuart has had an office in Bay Minette as well as Montgomery in the past; however, Stuart is finding herself in Montgomery as acting chief justice almost twice as much as she used to be.

“With the way the schedule’s working now, I don’t see myself spending much time there at all in the foreseeable future,” she said.

Going back to the roots of why Stuart went into law, she has an unusual story.

“You know, I don’t know (why I went into law),” she said, laughing. “I wanted to be a juvenile probation officer, but it didn’t look like it was going to be a possibility. I took the LSAT really almost on a lark; I didn’t give it much serious attention but I did really well, so I just decided I would go to law school. Once I got there I loved it, really from the moment I set foot in the classrooms.”

Stuart is married to George Stuart, has two sons, Tucker of Bay Minette and Shepard of Atlanta, Georgia, who are both engineers, and a daughter, Kelly, who volunteers at the Bay Minette Public Library. Stuart also has a granddaughter.