This is the second article drawn from the public court file in Hill v. Ballad Health, Case No. C45217(S), Circuit Court for Sullivan County at Kingsport. The first examined the July 2, 2026 dismissal order against the promises made on the record. This one is about something that never appears in the record at all.
Before the first hearing in his lawsuit against Ballad Health ever took place, Charles Ashley Hill knew something that most people who walk into a courtroom never learn about the judge who will decide their case.
He decided to trust the judge anyway.
This article is about that decision, what Tennessee’s own rules say should have happened instead, and why Hill believes every person who walks into that courtroom against Ballad Health from now on deserves to make the same choice he made — but with the facts in front of them.
The rule most people have never heard of
Tennessee has a rule for exactly this situation. It is called Rule 10B of the Rules of the Tennessee Supreme Court, and it gives any litigant the right to ask a judge to step aside — to “recuse” — when there is reason to question whether the judge can be impartial.
Behind it sits the Code of Judicial Conduct, which Tennessee judges are sworn to follow. Its central command is short: a judge “shall disqualify himself or herself in any proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”
Note the words. Not is biased. Not has done anything wrong. Might reasonably be questioned. The rule is about appearances, and it is written that way on purpose — because public confidence in the courts depends not only on judges being fair, but on the public having no reason to wonder.
And the Code goes one step further. The official comment to that rule says a judge “should disclose on the record information that the judge believes the parties or their lawyers might reasonably consider relevant to a possible motion for disqualification, even if the judge believes there is no basis for disqualification.”
Read that again. Even when the judge is certain he can be fair — and he may well be — the Code says the information should go on the record, so the litigant can decide for himself. The duty to speak belongs to the judge. The choice belongs to the litigant.
What Hill says he knew — and what public records show
Hill knew before his case began that Judge S. Curtis Rose’s wife, Dr. Jennifer A. Rose, is a physician — a pediatrician with her own practice in Kingsport. Public records fill in the rest. The federal National Provider Identifier registry, maintained by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, lists Dr. Jennifer A. Rose, MD, a pediatrician in Kingsport, as a sole proprietor — that is, an independent physician with her own practice. And Ballad Health’s own website carries her provider profile, listing her in Ballad’s physician directory; commercial directories list a hospital affiliation at Indian Path, a Ballad Health hospital in Kingsport.
An independent physician is not a Ballad employee. But physicians in private practice depend on hospital relationships — admitting arrangements, referral networks, coverage agreements, and the visibility of being listed in a health system’s own directory. A community pediatrician in Kingsport does not have many hospital systems to choose from. In Ballad’s 29-county service area, there is exactly one. Whatever the precise arrangement, the defendant in Hill’s lawsuit operates every hospital in the region where the judge’s wife practices medicine — and it publishes her profile on its own website.
That is what Hill understood, walking into that courtroom: in a one-hospital-system region, an independent physician’s livelihood runs through Ballad Health. There is no second system to admit her patients, take her referrals, or list her practice. The judge deciding whether Ballad Health would face discovery, depositions, and a jury was married to a doctor whose practice depends on staying in Ballad Health’s good graces. That is not an accusation against her, and Hill is the first to say so. “I think Dr. Rose is very well educated and a very good doctor,” he says — a highly trained pediatrician serving families in Kingsport, doing exactly what a physician should do. Nothing about this involves anything she did wrong. It is simply the definition of the situation the disqualification rule was written for — and one more reason the duty to speak sat with the judge, not with anyone else.
What Hill learned only later is this: the judge’s brother, J. Christopher Rose, is a partner at Hunter, Smith & Davis — the Kingsport law firm that represents Ballad Health in Hill’s case. The firm’s own website lists him among its partners; he grew up in Kingsport and joined the firm as a partner in 2022. Hunter, Smith & Davis’s representation of Ballad in this case is a matter of court record — its name is on every motion that sought dismissal.
The judge, of course, remains free to address any of this. What requires no confirmation from anyone is what the court file shows — and what it doesn’t.
The duty belonged to the judge — not to Hill
This is the part that gets lost when people talk about recusal, so it deserves to be said plainly.
Under Tennessee’s Code of Judicial Conduct, the duty to disclose was Judge Rose’s. Not Hill’s. Not Ballad’s. Not the clerk’s. The Code does not ask litigants to investigate a judge’s family before walking into court, and it does not make disclosure optional depending on whether anyone thinks to ask. The comments to Rule 2.11 make the obligation self-executing: a judge’s duty not to hear matters requiring disqualification “applies regardless of whether a motion to disqualify is filed.” And the disclosure duty in Comment 5 is addressed to one person in the courtroom — the one wearing the robe.
The design of the rule is simple, and it is designed that way for a reason: the judge is the only person who knows, with certainty, who his wife is and who his brother is. So the Code puts the burden of speaking first on the only person who can carry it. The judge discloses; the litigant decides. That is the entire mechanism. It never ran in this case.
A pediatric practice promoted on the defendant’s own website. A brother who is a partner at the firm defending the case. If a juror had those connections to Ballad Health, no court in Tennessee would seat them without disclosure and questioning — and either side could strike them. The judge, who holds more power over the outcome than any twelve jurors combined, was the one person in the courtroom whose connections were never placed on the record. Not because the rules don’t require it — but because the only person the rules assign that duty to never spoke it.
What the record shows: silence
The file in Hill v. Ballad Health now contains two motion hearings, sixty-seven pages of official transcripts, a first amended complaint, more than forty pages of defense motions and memoranda, and a thirteen-page dismissal order.
Nowhere in any of it — not at the May 1 hearing, not at the June 16 hearing, not in any order — does a disclosure appear. No statement from the bench that the judge’s wife practices medicine in a region where the defendant owns every hospital. No statement that a member of the judge’s family practices law at the firm defending the case. Nothing on the record for Hill to weigh, object to, or waive.
The Code’s comment describes exactly this situation: information a party “might reasonably consider relevant,” which the judge is to disclose on the record — even if the judge is confident it changes nothing. The record of this case contains no such disclosure. The duty existed. The record is silent. Anyone can check; the file is public.
Why Hill stayed silent — then
Hill had Rule 10B available from the first day. He never filed it. By his own account, that was deliberate.
He believed in the justice system, he says. He liked the judge. He went out of his way, throughout the case, to show the court respect — the transcripts bear that out. He did not want to win by attacking the referee; he wanted his case decided on its merits, and he extended the bench the benefit of every doubt.
“I was confident enough in the justice system that I did not think a judge would give Ballad a defense, and break ethics and procedure to protect Ballad,” Hill says. “Not until the dismissal. That’s when it all came together about Rule 10B.”
The July 2 order is what he means. As detailed in the previous article, that order dismissed his case using a defense Ballad’s lawyers never raised in more than forty pages of motions; described the alteration of his medical record as something that “could be perceived as a device to hide the false medical tests and results,” then concluded there were no facts of concealment; and resolved a question Tennessee courts call a jury question — without a jury, without evidence, and before a single page of discovery. Those citations, with page numbers, are in the court file.
The order did what the family connections alone never did: it made him ask the question the recusal rule exists to answer. He describes where that leaves him in one sentence:
“Just a citizen believing in the scales of justice — who now sees why she is blindfolded.”
Why he isn’t filing it now — and why he’s talking instead
Here is the honest, uncomfortable part, and Hill does not run from it: Rule 10B motions must be filed promptly. A litigant who knows the facts and proceeds anyway — hoping for the best, taking the ruling as it comes — is generally treated by the courts as having waived the objection. Courts call the alternative “sandbagging”: holding a recusal card to play only if you lose. Hill knew about the judge’s wife from the start. A motion filed today, he acknowledges, would likely be dismissed as too late, and he would deserve the criticism.
So this is not a recusal motion. Hill is not asking Judge Rose to step down, and this article does not accuse the judge of ruling as he did because of any family connection. No one outside the court’s own mind can know why the order reads the way it reads.
But waiver is personal. Hill can waive his own objection. He cannot waive the next litigant’s — and that is the point of speaking now. The disclosure duty in the Code is not a one-case duty; it applies every time the question could reasonably be asked. Ballad Health is the region’s only hospital system and, by any measure, among the most frequent and most powerful litigants in the courts of Northeast Tennessee. Cases involving Ballad will come before this courtroom for as long as both exist.
Every one of those future litigants — every nurse with an employment claim, every patient with a records dispute, every family with a grievance against the only hospital system they have — is entitled to the choice the Code describes: hear the disclosure, then decide for themselves whether to object or to proceed. Hill made that choice blind, on faith. He believes the next person should get to make it with eyes open.
The standard is the point
None of this requires believing anything bad about anyone. That is what people misunderstand about judicial ethics rules. The disqualification standard — “might reasonably be questioned” — exists to protect three things at once: the litigant, the public’s confidence, and the judge himself. A judge who discloses on the record is not confessing a conflict; he is armoring his own ruling against exactly the questions now being asked. Disclosure costs a judge thirty seconds. Its absence can cost a ruling its legitimacy — no matter how correct the ruling might be.
The State of Tennessee wrote these rules. Tennessee’s Supreme Court adopted them. They are not Hill’s rules, and enforcing their spirit is not an attack on the bench — it is the bench’s own standard, applied to a case the public can read for itself.
The file is at the Circuit Court Clerk’s office in Kingsport. The Code of Judicial Conduct is Rule 10 of the Rules of the Tennessee Supreme Court, posted on the state courts’ own website, and the disclosure comment is right there under Rule 2.11. Read them side by side with the transcripts.
Then ask the question the rule was written for. Not “did the judge do something wrong?” — that is not the standard, and it is not the claim. The question the State of Tennessee itself instructs us to ask is simpler:
Might a reasonable person wonder?
Case No. C45217(S), Hill v. Ballad Health, Circuit Court for Sullivan County at Kingsport. The dismissal order, hearing transcripts, and parties’ filings are public records available from the Circuit Court Clerk’s office. The Tennessee Code of Judicial Conduct, including Rule of Judicial Conduct 2.11 and its comments, is available at tncourts.gov. Dr. Jennifer A. Rose’s provider profile appears on balladhealth.org; her NPI record (No. 1063730943) is available at npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov. J. Christopher Rose’s attorney profile appears at hsdlaw.com.
