Law Commons^™

We should distinguish the process that initially selects a judge from the process that determines whether to retain that judge on the court. Judicial selection and judicial retention raise different issues. In this paper, I primarily focus on selection. I summarize the fifty states’ methods of supreme court selection and place them on a continuum from the most populist to the most elitist. Doing so reveals that the Missouri Plan is the most elitist (and least democratic) of the three common methods of selecting judges in the United States. After highlighting this troubling characteristic of the Missouri Plan’s process of …