Ten years of judicial leadership as Lane County Circuit Court Presiding Judge established quite clearly to Mary Ann Bearden that “sitting judge” is more than simply a definition applied to an active judge. Judges, indeed, do a lot of sitting, she discovered. So much sitting, in fact, that she retired at age 60 to give her back a break. “Pain was a huge incentive,” Bearden says of her decision to step down from her Circuit Court position in 2012. When Bearden was seated as Lan