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A decades-long battle is raging between Maryland’s Orphans’ Court judges and the Maryland Bar Association over whether our probate judges should be lawyers or laypeople. The legislature recently threw down the gauntlet for the latest skirmish, passing legislation in its 2025 session to create a task force ostensibly to study “improving the efficiency, uniformity, and quality” of estate processes.
But this conflict is a sideshow. While the task force focuses narrowly on judges’ credentials, jurisdiction and elections, it is ignoring the fundamental problems harming Maryland families forced into the government’s labyrinthine estate system…