 My name is Mark Schlag, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we will go across the sea to the FSM. You may ask, what does FSM stand for? That's the title of our program. What is the FSM? Where did it come from? What type of legal systems does it have? And today my guest is Edward King. Mr. King was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the FSM. We will discuss the creation and composition of the FSM, Mr. King's road to becoming the Chief Justice of the FSM, and the FSM's legal system. And what Mr. King's role was in its development. Aloha Mr. King, Chief Justice King, Aloha, welcome. Aloha to you Mark, and may I call you Ed? You could call me Ed, I would be much more comfortable with that. You tipped me off earlier that I could do that, so I appreciate the courtesy. Ed, what does FSM stand for? FSM stands for the Federated States of Micronesia, and to understand how it came into being, because it included within it several different cultural and language groups, you have to understand a little farther back, and that is the trust territory of the Islands of the Pacific. And that was created in an agreement between the United States and the United Nations at the end of World War II. And the United States took one of the 11 trusteeships that were created by the United Nations at that time, so that metropolitan nations could oversee the economic and political development of the areas that were placed under their trusteeship responsibility. And at that point it included Palau and the Marshall Islands and the Northern Mariana Islands, which is now a separate commonwealth of the United States, and that area was a tremendous area in the ocean, as big as the United States, continental United States at least. And from that, in the 70s, a strong movement began, the early 70s, toward other of these trusteeships had been disbanded up in the 60s, and so far at that time there had been no movement by the United States. But now, you know, in the next few years, and as early as 1977, the Constitution had been developed by the Federated States of Micronesia, and even operation of government, kind of partial sovereignty had developed, like for example, the Federated States of Micronesia at the time that I became part of it had an executive branch and a legislative branch and the existence of various states within it, but it had no judicial system that was created for it. The trust territory of the Pacific Islands High Court was still carrying out the courtwork. And that was, that High Court was part of what? Who was in charge of that? The High Court was part of what the United States had created under the trusteeship arrangement, and it consisted of judges appointed by the Secretary of the Interior, and unfortunately serving at the Secretary's pleasure. So these judges were, they were actually a little more like administrative people. They had no judicial independence at any day. The Secretary of the Interior offended with this particular decision could send that person back home. And so they were still in charge, but these people were always appointed by the Secretary of the Interior, and they were always subject to displacements by the Secretary of the Interior. So it really reduced anything approaching judicial independence for that court. So that was post World War II situation, and the United Nations decided that these islands, which I guess they're, the islands are close to the Philippines and the Philippines. The islands are an area, well, if we're talking about the trust territory, I've kind of talked about where that is, but I didn't say where it was in relation to other places. And you're right. It's between, it's to the west of Hawaii, and primarily a little south of Hawaii. And then the Philippines are down at the other end there, the next beginning of the rest of the world. And then since then, Palau, which is the westernmost, has developed its own republic, the Republic of Palau, the Marshall Islands, which is the easternmost area, has become the Republic of the Marshall Islands. And that left, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana now has been opted to become part or within the jurisprudence and jurisdiction of the United States. And that left Kushai, Pompeii, Shook, and Yap areas staying with the Federated States of Micronesia. Okay. So, and those four areas are like independent states, is that what they are, or part of the Federation? What is the relationship with those? They're very comparable to states in the United States. They have a broad range of powers, but there is a federal government that does certain things, and they have a constitution very similar to that of the United States, indeed based upon, modeled upon the United States constitution, in part because I think people felt they had, they could compare life under the Germans and under the Japanese and under the Spanish even before that. And they thought the United States was, although some people would say, no, that wasn't the case, and that even the Japanese, who were pretty darn tough at that time, some people would say, well, that was better because there was more order, etc. But I think most of the people thought a relationship with the United States would be pretty good. And so that was maybe the model, is what you're saying, of the constitution that ultimately developed. And who was behind that? You said this happened in the 60s to 70s, is that the period of time? Who was behind it? There were some really admirable leaders at that point. One of the things that made Micronesia attractive to me at that time, and I was living in the, well, I was living in Saipan from 1972 to, toward the end of 1976, as a legal services attorney. And I came to know who some of those key figures were throughout Micronesia because I was chief of litigation there for the legal services program, and we did a lot of big deal things during that time. And I got to know the areas well and the people within them. We always represented Micronesians. And quite often it was vis-a-vis the trust territory government. So it was wonderfully exciting legal work, and also really good and gave me a good chance. And my wife was a, my wife was also editor, or she was working with Civic Daily News and she was the Micronesia, the head of Micronesian Bureau, as such as it was. She was, in fact, the Micronesian Bureau, but she also traveled throughout Micronesia. So we both got a good background in Micronesia and got to know a lot of Micronesian people. So post-war there was this kind of trusty ship of these islands, then four of them, these island states got together, sounds like, and there was an internal push for some sort of independence, but modeled after the United States Constitution in a way. With a strong wish to be independent and govern themselves, too. And that was internal. But I should add one other thing to be able to understand how they got together because they were a long way apart, even though they were under the same umbrella. A lot of sea in between. You bet. And the trust territory government allowed to be formed, or you could perhaps say did form a Congress of Micronesia. And a lot of key leaders emerged in that institution and they became a voice vis-a-vis the trust territory, which, you know, inevitable, even having, if it had done the greatest job, which it did not, but if it had, it would still have been unpopular because it was an outside governing vehicle. But the leaders, some of the leaders that emerged were Toso Nakayama, who became the first president, and on Amaraj, who was, though they are both from Chook, and on was the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When I got to know him, and he also served as a board member of Legal Services, and so I got to know him through that context. And then Petrus Toon, who became the vice president, he was from YAP, and John Mangafell, who was served ultimately as the governor of YAP for a number of years, and Bethwell Henry, would be the people that I considered really the most important leaders. And these four states were separated by vast oceans, and did they have other things that separated them or made them in common, or why did they choose to come together? They chose, in part they chose to come together. They chose by a large majority, but in part they did that as a practical matter because they didn't have really any particular alternative. They really didn't want to do what the Commonwealth of Northern Marianas did to actually just kind of opt out of Micronesia. I think if anything, there was a little more of a sense that the islands that comprise Micronesia are a little more committed to the idea of Micronesia. There's some question about whether there is such a place as Micronesia, and it was a name that was convenient to kind of pick up everybody in a particular area of the world, but people didn't use to call themselves Micronesians. They were always blown pans or chookies or whatever. Do they still do that? They still refer to Micronesia? Micronesia? Or do they still refer to themselves by their island state? Oh, yeah. It's just, well, of course a lot of people in the U.S. still think of themselves particularly. That's right. I mean, you know, what are you? Where are you from? Oh, Hawaii. I live in Hawaii, and the same Indiana I grew up in, and I was very strongly Indiana, but I was also very strongly United States, and I always thought the United States ran well. And so it sounds like these folks felt there was a benefit to being a community together in a federation, although they still retained some of their feelings about them, their own island state. Exactly. But they said, you know, for everybody it's good to join together. Be part of this one group, this one federation. That's right. But also to understand the nuance involved in that, there was also a constitutional convention formed. And that constitutional convention was attended by people from all parts of the trust territory. The Northern Marianas, Palau, the Marshalls, and then also Kushai, Yap, One-Page Hook, and then was now the Federated States of Micronesia. And they formed this vehicle, the Constitution. And it was a very carefully thought out vehicle. Norm Miller from Hawaii was there, and he was a really very well-known political science professor at UH, and was a wonderful person. And he was the head of the administrative head and kind of the legal workhead of the Constitutional Convention. Okay. I want to take a break right now, and then we'll talk about post-convention, and what happened, and the legal system, and how you became Chief Justice, and what issues you found in that job. All right? All right. There's a lot there. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Gabrieli, the host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Aloha. I'm Keeley Iakina, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Iakina. Aloha. We are back with Ed King, the first chief justice of the federated states of Micronesia. And when we left off, we were talking about a convention that was held amongst the Micronesian islands and, for lack of a better name, Ed. Micronesia is what encompassed all of those islands, I guess, and that's what they went under. That's right. This is a discussion. Keterbos also, you know, geographically is part of Micronesia, but it was never part of the trust territory. How did you, a boy from Indiana, get involved in federated states of Micronesia and ever become its chief justice, the first chief justice? Right. It's really, it's a remarkable set of experiences, but it really, to understand that I was a lawyer and my wife and I got married back in 1961. And when I graduated from law school in 1964 at Indiana University, we, our vision of life was, or at least mine, but I think it was Joan, my wife's, at that point too, was kind of the picket fence and a little white house on a street somewhere. And that changed as our life went on. We began, you know, we were in the 1960s, late 60s and the 70s, we were in Detroit. And Detroit, you know, has really just had so many issues, and those issues existed then. One was the, the, all the ring of housing around Detroit that was segregated, so on. Anyway, we also got in discussion groups that were kind of quasi-religious and quasi-social justice. And so we, by the time we got to a race riot in Detroit in 1967 and the Vietnam War, which was putting us out on the street and others and other ancillary issues, no longer did it seem appropriate. And then we'd go back to what we thought in these discussions, and we realized our lives were asymmetrical with our values. Our values said we, I should use my legal knowledge to help people that honestly had no representation. And a corporation is always going to get good representation because it will pay a lot for it. But there is no good money in serving the poor as a lawyer. And so you have to be prepared to rearrange your life and rearrange your goals. And we did that. We went through that process. My wife was, was very much happier with the new goals as was I. And so we got into that. And I started running a program at the University of Detroit that helped, we dealt with segregation and housing issues, Center for Urban Law and Housing, it was called. And then we, and then I saw this thing about Micronesia, that there were, they were setting up a new program there, which Flabberg asked me. I couldn't imagine how the U.S. system could work in Micronesia. I called Joan and I said, would you like to go to Micronesia? And she said, no. And I said, no, do you know where it is? And she said, no. And that's one of the reasons. And but ultimately she was persuaded that it actually was a good thing to do. And I went not to help create the program, but later after it had been created, the person that was in charge of litigation left the deputy, he was deputy director and he left there. And I interviewed for the job and that was by itself an interesting story, but I won't go there now. And so I then became the director of litigation at Micronesian Legal Services Corporation. And as I said, it got us all over Micronesia and exposed us to big issues like challenging the U.S. about explosives, testing, and then we talk. And we persuaded them that they needed to stop that before the court issued an injunction. But it was clear that the court would have done that, Sam King here in Hawaii as the federal judge, a wonderful man. Yes, he is. A good friend of mine. At some point. But you need to use past tense. Yes. He was a good friend, a very good friend. I know his kids very well. Yes. He was wonderful. We did a program on his life here with his doctor. Good for you. So after the Constitution, they needed to chief justice. All right. And how did that? Well, it was very interesting. You got a call on the phone? We left. It really was like that. We left in September of 1976. We came back and I started running the National Senior Citizens Law Center. And one day, somebody called my office and our person who answered the phone came back and told me there's somebody here from Micronesia and he would like to see you. And so we set up a time and the person was somebody I knew, but not really well. I didn't know these leaders really well, but they knew who I was and I knew who they were. And so this was Petrus Toon from YAP, but also the first vice president of the Federated States of Micronesia and also another wonderful person. And he came and told me that the president, Tosuo Nakayama, had sent him because he wanted to have him ask me if I would be the first chief justice. And I came out of the blue. Came totally out of the blue and I went home and told my family and we sat Sunday morning we sat down and we had breakfast together and we talked about this. And somewhere in the course of the meal, each one of us jointly and separately in some time cried because it was such a powerful thing both ways. The kids really were reluctant to have and we all knew we would basically break up our nuclear family. One of our daughters was in college at Boston University, but the others were both high school or grade school. And they would no longer grow up in our household because we knew that it wouldn't just be a workable situation. So it then took another several months and it happened that I had a trip through Micronesia and I met all these legal service attorneys and they all knew, kind of thought I'd already been appointed and they all really worked on me to do it. And so I wound up telling the president I would. Okay, so you became the chief justice of the Federated States of Micronesia. What were your major concerns and what happened and what was perhaps some of your critical decisions during that period after you became chief justice? Very quickly, when I arrived in March of 82 for this purpose, I met Judge Benson, Richard Benson, who had been a judge in Guam for quite some time when it was University of Michigan Law School graduate. And he had arrived the day before I did because he knew I was coming in at that time. And so he worked with me throughout all of this, although I probably won't pay him proper tribute as I go along. And then we didn't have an office, we didn't have a court, we had our own houses in the first year. My wife didn't come the first year because she was trying to get the kids situated. So I was there a year and six, four months and I had court. We weren't ready to hear cases either. We had this, the United States had set out another thing called Secretary of Order 8093. And it recalled it for us to get our court certified by the Chief Justice of the Trust Territory High Court. We needed to do something like that anyway to get started. So we were having to form court rules, etc., all the things you need to do and identify positions we needed filled and start looking for those positions and get them filled. So in the couple minutes we have left, tell me how did you deal with the conflicts or controversies getting into customs and traditions of the people and the new Constitution? We were given jurisdiction for all cases where somebody could be sentenced for criminal cases where somebody could be sentenced for three or more years. And that put us into lots of places where there are conflicts. One of the biggest conflicts was when there was either punishment or forgiveness under customary or traditional law, but the prosecutor of the state who was handling the prosecution wanted to go on and continue the case in the case of a forgiveness and say, no, we don't recognize that forgiveness. The court should have a separate trial, and so that was a problem. And we ultimately decided in that that a lot of things had changed since that practice had been developed and that we wanted to encourage the practice because it did a thing the Western system doesn't even do. It brings the parties together and they forgive and they talk to each other and they sit and they drink socal, a sacred drink in Pompeii in this case, but some other kind of resolution and gifts back and forth and so on in the other areas. And that definitely we wanted to uphold, but we wanted to monitor in a way and then we gave benefit for that in the sentencing. We acknowledged that and took into consideration the fact that the forgiveness had taken place in developing our sentence and it really reduced the sentencing in those cases. So you're trying to compromise or find a compromise between traditions and the Western law? The Constitution and the statutes say here is what you do when there's this particular kind of crime and the customary way had been different and treating basically all these different except in the nuances of the particular settlement. And there was another really important area, Mark, and that was the area of customary punishments. There were situations where people of the community, and this had been done traditionally, particularly in the state of the app we encountered this, took the person that they believed and thought they knew had done it and they would take this person out and beat the person up in one way or the other, different ways and so on depending on what young man's men were involved in the particular punishment and we had to decide what do we do with that. And the state of the app wanted us to let it go. The state of the app had developed a policy of if there was a customary settlement they were not going to prosecute because that would offend the chiefs and the app's customary system is very strong to this day and so that would have been a problem. But the app attorney general and I differed very much on that and ultimately he won. Our criminal, it's a much longer story than I've given but that's a sweep and then there are relationships between family members and so on when some kind of big conflict and they start hitting or chopping at each other and that kind of stuff, we had to work on that and there were numerous instances of people feeling there was some custom that allowed them to do something that under normal circumstances would not be acceptable and we had to wait our way through that, how we would treat those things. Just to close up, is there any connection between Hawaii and Federated States of Micronesia that you'd like to mention or talk about? Yeah, one important, I mean first Hawaii and various Micronesian areas had the same missionaries. All Congregationalists they managed to get out that far too and Kushai is deeply affected by that now but because the women sit in white on the floor, everybody sits on the floor and the men, everybody's got suits and the women have white dresses and it's really remarkable thing is to throw back to when the missionaries came and it's never changed there. But I wanted to tell about, mention Mal Pialug who was a very honored man but he was a great navigator of a lot of navigators that had traditionally been in Micronesia. Probably the Micronesians were perhaps the best navigators in the world and I think they definitely were in the Pacific and Pialug came when the Hawaiians were trying to develop and go their skills, redevelop their skills and to go back to Tahiti and the first time they went they just got all upset with each other and just abandoned the effort about halfway through and then they were told about Pialug who was this honored statesman and seafarer still in Yap and Pialug came and helped them and developed them into a good crew and they did the work and he also helped brought his skills and taught them and that's led to Ninoa Thompson and the Hokaleia and all that he actually they were going in the Hokaleia at that at those times so but it it turned the Hawaiians into seafarers. He was a navigator on that on that first successful flight but he was also the guy that held the group together which was important also. Yeah and so we learned a lot from him and from somebody from what is now the Federated States of Micronesia. That's absolutely right. So maybe that's that's what it's all about. I think there are lots of reasons for people to cooperate over large distances and have an understanding of who each other are. Ed thank you very much for being my guest today there was a lot we talked about a lot more we can talk about and hopefully we'll have you back again we can talk about some more. All right get into that custom and tradition a little more next time. Thank you very much. Aloha.