Before Montgomery County Judge Dan Clifford took the bench for the first time last week under the seal of Pennsylvania, officials began filling the courtroom and chatting about what an exciting day it was.
Clifford holds the title of first openly gay county official elected in the state outside Philadelphia.
“I get to see it from the ground-up,” said Michele M. Sherry, Clifford’s court reporter. She was not officially working Jan. 7. Her husband needed her at a health appointment. But she didn’t want to miss Clifford’s entrance.
“I woke up excited like a little kid,” Sherry said of the day after the November elections when she found out Clifford had won. She said she wanted to work for him because his staff feels like a family.
Jonathan Hoffman, a lawyer with Klehr Harrison Harvey Branzburg, said he hadn’t felt so excited in court since his own first day. Hoffman and Clifford worked together three years ago at the Weber Gallagher law firm.
“Welcome to Courtroom 11,” Clifford said as he entered at 9 a.m. on the dot. “Although it’s my first day in court, I’ve been practicing family law for over 30 years.”
He told PGN he was scheduled to hear 12 cases that day: four at 9 a.m., four at 11 a.m. and four at 1:30 p.m. He also had at least 65 days of trials to get on the books before heading out of town this week to attend judge training.
“The biggest worry I have right now is approaching the backlog and being able to get to these cases fast enough,” Clifford said, noting one of his goals is to improve the efficiency of family court. He’s advocated for state legislation — which passed the House in the fall and now awaits action in the Senate — to amend the divorce code and move cases through the system more quickly.
“People just want a decision,” Clifford said. “Some of these cases are pending since September. They just want a decision, so that they can start moving ahead to the next stage of what they need to do. Being in a hold position in a family situation is never a good result, especially with kids involved.”
Clifford feels gratified to win a judgeship. He was a Democratically endorsed candidate in this election after running with Republican support in 2011. He sensed some pushback in the past because of his sexuality.
“There was trouble getting my signs at some of the polling places,” he said. “Even though I had a lot of support in the Republican Party, demonstrated by the votes I would get in the endorsement conventions, there was still a portion of that group that wasn’t ever going to support me. I didn’t face that this time, at all.”
Clifford has a no-nonsense approach to dealing with the mothers, fathers and other family members that come before him. He explains custody proceedings in plain English and approaches each case with the child in mind.
Clifford frequently recommends co-parent counseling and told one set of parents in disagreement about where their daughter should attend school: “It comes back, I believe, to what your daughter said regarding the two of you getting along. From reading her responses in the report, it seems it would upset her in some way for one parent to have all the control of the decisions.”
Clifford majored in political science as an undergraduate at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania and earned a law degree from the University of Baltimore. He said family law first appealed to him when he started practicing at a small firm in York.
“No one wanted to do family law,” he said. “I got an interest in it rather quickly. You could get in court right away. In a lot of these practice areas, you’re second chair to a litigator for sometimes years, basically doing the research, carrying the bags.”
Once he got in the courtroom, he realized family law had a real impact on people’s lives.
“You’re seeing real people every day,” Clifford said. “In civil court, you’re seeing corporations and insurance companies. In criminal court, you’ve got the commonwealth on one side and you have somebody else on the other side. It’s not really dealing with people’s problems the way I wanted to deal with them.”
Clifford said he has seen his approach to family law change as he started his own family. He and his husband Jonathan Weinhold, a certified registered nurse anesthetist at Abington Jefferson Health, married in 2014 after more than 20 years together. They adopted their son Matthew Weinhold Clifford in 1999. Clifford adopted Matthew first, and it took three years for Weinhold to legally adopt his son through a second-parent adoption. The state Supreme Court made the decision in 2002 to uphold adoption for same-sex parents.
“When I was a young attorney, a judge said to me, ‘Well you don’t understand what it’s like because you don’t have a child,’” Clifford said. “I used to think it doesn’t mean I can’t have empathy for that situation. But I have to admit having a child does change your perspective on so many things.
“You’ve got to develop a huge amount of patience,” Clifford continued. “My husband gets out to the hospital early, so I’m the morning guy in our family. I used to joke that by the time I walked into the courtroom at 9 o’clock, I’d already lost the first three arguments of the day: you know, get dressed, get moving, eat your breakfast. You develop a huge amount of patience that you may not ordinarily have if you’re not responsible for another person in your life.”
Clifford said he’s grateful to his husband and son for growing into a calm family. It keeps him fulfilled while dealing, oftentimes, with the dissolutions of marriages and families in court.
“I’ve always said it: If you practice in family court, you must have a personal life that has some calm to it,” Clifford said. “You couldn’t do this all day, every day, and then go home and have similar problems.”
He treats his staff with the same no-drama philosophy. He said coworkers in the legal field sometimes spend more time with each other than with their families.
Clifford said he feels gratified with the outpouring of public support for his judgeship and has pride in being the first openly gay Montgomery County judge.
“None of us were absolutely certain it was going to happen this cycle,” he said. “It could have been in a future cycle. Now that it’s happened in Montgomery County, hopefully it’ll happen in Bucks or Delaware as well.”