Delaware County Probate/Juvenile Court Judge David Hejmanowski has been elected by the judges of Ohio to a 10-year term as an officer of the Ohio Judicial Conference (OJC).
Formed by a 1963 act of the Ohio General Assembly at the behest of Chief Justice Kingsley Taft, the Ohio Judicial Conference is the only organization that simultaneously represents the interests of all 722 active judges in Ohio, each of whom is a member of the organization.
Of those 722 judges, only five serve as officers of the organization, one each from the general, domestic relations, probate/juvenile, municipal/county, and appellate divisions. Each of those five officers serves for 10 years, acting as chair of the Ohio Judicial Conference in the seventh and eighth years of that commitment.
Judge Joyce Campbell, of the Fairfield Municipal Court, will serve as chair for the 2020-2022 term. In the nearly six decade history of the conference, only one Delaware County judge has served as chair — Judge Everett Krueger, of the general division, from 2004-2006.
For the next two years, Hejmanowski will serve as second vice chair of the OJC, in charge of planning for the conference’s multi-day meeting and educational seminar, held annually in September. The educational responsibilities dovetail well with Hejmanowski’s other responsibilities as he is also currently a member of the board of trustees of the Ohio Judicial College, which is responsible for planning all judicial and court employee education, the Board of Directors of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, which plans annual education for juvenile and family court judges throughout the nation, and the Board of Fellows of the National Center for Juvenile Justice, the nation’s leading research institute on juvenile justice matters.
In addition to those responsibilities, Hejmanowski is a member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Juvenile Justice, the Board of Trustees of the Ohio Bar Foundation, and is currently serving as president of the Delaware County Historical Society, vice president of the Central Ohio Symphony, and vice president of the board of the Arena Fair Theater Company. He presides over nearly 6,000 cases per year in the probate/juvenile court. He has penned more than 600 columns for the Delaware Gazette, where his “Case Study” column on the law and history has appeared weekly since 2005.
