Roane State Community College

Former Georgia Judge Michael C. Clark was the guest speaker during the Spring 2017 Roane State Social and Behavioral Science Forum. Roane State student Peyton Smiley is shown with him after his talk.

May 11, 2017

By Bob Fowler
Roane State staff writer

A longtime judge who said he suffered judicial burnout and stepped off the bench three years ago after presiding over thousands of cases has some pithy advice for college students bent on achieving success.

“Learn to focus,” Judge Michael C. Clark said during his talk during the Spring 2017 Roane State Social and Behavioral Science Forum at the Oak Ridge campus

“Learn to write,” the jurist added, saying that writing has become something of a “lost skill.”

Clark, 64, said he was paid $170,000 a year when he decided in March 2014 to step away from his judge’s job while in the midst of his sixth, four-year term. It had gotten to the point, he said, where “nobody wanted to run against me” for his job as a Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge.

He said he promptly went back into private practice after resigning and by the next week, his paycheck had essentially doubled.

Clark, longtime friends with Roane State Professor Casey Cobb, is a self-confessed “professional student” whose interests outside academia range from a brief stint in professional baseball to long-distance biking to piloting airplanes.

While in college he was undecided on his career choices, he told the small crowd, when Dean Rusk, a former U.S. Secretary of State, recommended a legal career over aerospace engineering.

As a trial judge, Clark said he handled some 30,000 cases, including about 20,000 divorces.

Judges often face threats, he said, and those warnings come far more often during hot-tempered civil cases than criminal proceedings. “I’d much rather have a good, clean murder than a divorce case,” he said.

At one point, he said, he gave blueprints of his Georgia home to security officials in the event they needed to make a rapid emergency response to his residence.

Perhaps the most high-profile case of his career as a judge involved a dentist who killed his wife in 2004 and a girlfriend 14 years earlier while he was in dental school. Both deaths were initially declared suicides.

Barton Corbin pleaded guilty to two counts of malice murder four days into jury selection. “He was a scary guy,” Clark said of Corbin.

Despite the uproar over the fracas where a United Airlines passenger was forcibly removed from his seat and dragged off the plane, Clark said any legal action the passenger takes against United “will never get past summary judgment.”

“He (the passenger) doesn’t really have a case,” he said, noting that the airline ticket contract information stipulates that United can remove a passenger from an overbooked plane.​