Law Commons^™

Weighing Democracy And Judicial Legitimacy In Judicial Selection, Kenneth S. Klein

Faculty Scholarship

For over two centuries Americans have debated whether judges should be elected or appointed. While the explicitly-framed tension has been about the relative importance of judicial independence and judicial accountability in a democracy, the underlying issue has been about which structure better promotes the legitimacy of the judiciary. An institution has legitimacy when it enjoys diffuse support even for controversial decisions. Judicial legitimacy is in inherent tension with a judiciary in a democracy, since democracy implicitly assumes political elements to selection of all leaders (including judges), while judicial legitimacy is undermined by politics. The contemporary work on the relationship between …

Monsanto Lecture: The Complicated Business Of State Supreme Court Elections: An Empirical Perspective, Michael Heise

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Proponents of judicial elections and related campaign activities emphasize existing First Amendment jurisprudence as well as similarities linking publicly elected state judges and other publicly-elected state officials. Opponents focus on judicial campaign contributions’ corrosive effects, including their potential to unduly influence judicial outcomes. Using a comprehensive data set of 2,345 business-related cases decided by state supreme courts across all fifty states between 2010–12, judicial election critics, including Professor Joanna Shepherd, emphasize the potential for bias and find that campaign contributions from business sources to state supreme court judicial candidates corresponded with candidates’ pro-business votes as justices. While Shepherd’s main findings …

The Ideological Consequences Of Selection: A Nationwide Study Of The Methods Of Selecting Judges, Brian T. Fitzpatrick

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

One topic that has gone largely unexplored in the long debate over how best to select judges is whether there are any ideological consequences to employing one selection method versus another. The goal of this study is to assess whether certain methods of selection have resulted in judiciaries that skew to the left or right compared with the public at large in those states. In particular, I examine the ideological preferences of state appellate judges in all 50 states over a 20-year period (1990-2010) as measured by their relative affiliation with the Republican or Democratic Party through campaign contributions, voter …

Tailored Judicial Selection, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

American states have experimented with different methods of judicial selection for two centuries, creating uniquely American models of selection, like judicial elections, rarely used throughout the rest of the world. But despite the wide range of selection methods in existence throughout the nation, neither the American people nor legal scholars have given much thought to tailoring the selection method to particular levels of the judiciary. To the contrary, the most common approach to judicial selection in the United States is what I call a unilocular, “a judge is a judge,” approach. For most of our nation’s history, all judges within …

Recusal Failure, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

The American judiciary is suffering from a terrible affliction: biased judges. I am not talking about the subconscious or unconscious biases — stemming from different backgrounds, experiences, ideologies, etc. — that everyone, including judges, harbors. Rather, I am describing invidious, improper biases that lead judges to favor one litigant over another for reasons that almost everyone would agree should play no role in judicial decision-making: the desire to repay a debt of gratitude to those who helped the judge get elected and be reelected.

In this article, I argue that that recusal has failed to prevent biased judges from rendering …

Check One And The Accountability Is Done: The Harmful Impact Of Straight-Ticket Voting On Judicial Elections, Meryl Chertoff, Dustin F. Robinson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

States that elect judges are heir to a populist tradition dating back to the Jacksonian era. In the spectrum between independence and accountability, these states emphasize accountability. Systems vary from state to state, and even within states there may be geographic diversity or different selection systems for different levels of courts. Elections can be partisan or non-partisan, contested, or, as in merit-selection states, retention. Some states have dabbled in public financing of judicial elections. Reformers are most critical of contested partisan elections. Those are the elections where the most money is spent, the nastiest ads aired, and the dignity of …

Iowa’S 2010 Judicial Election: Appropriate Accountability Or Rampant Passion?, Roy A. Schotland

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Although 89% of state judges (appellate and general-jurisdiction trial judges) face some type of election, judicial elections are rarely thought of even by academics interested in elections. Iowa’s 2010 election, in which three Justices were defeated, is one of the most significant judicial elections ever. The Justices lost their seats because they participated in a unanimous 2009 decision upholding gay marriage. That decision stirred intense opposition among “social conservatives”, in Iowa a substantial proportion of the population and actively led by more than 100 ministers.

That active opposition was one of eight elements that created a perfect storm against the …

Economic Crisis And The Rise Of Judicial Elections And Judicial Review, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

Almost ninety percent of state judges today face some kind of popular election. This uniquely American institution emerged in a sudden burst from 1846 to 1853, as twenty states adopted judicial elections. The modern perception is that judicial elections, then and now, weaken judges and the rule of law. When judicial elections swept the country in the late 1840s and 1850s, however, the key was a new movement to limit legislative power, to increase judicial power, and to strengthen judicial review. Over time, judicial appointments had become a tool of party patronage and cronyism.

Legislative overspending on internal improvements and …

The Twist Of Long Terms: Judicial Elections, Role Fidelity, And American Tort Law, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The received wisdom is that American judges rejected strict liability through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the contrary, a majority of state courts adopted Rylands v. Fletcher and strict liability for hazardous or unnatural activities after a series of flooding tragedies in the late nineteenth century. Federal judges and appointed state judges generally ignored or rejected Rylands, while elected state judges overwhelmingly adopted Rylands or a similar strict liability rule.

In moving from fault to strict liability, these judges were essentially responding to increased public fears of industrial or man-made hazards. Elected courts were more populist: they were …

Judicial Recusal & Expanding Notions Of Due Process, Andrey Spektor, Michael A. Zuckerman

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

The merits of judicial elections have been litigated in journals around the country. In light of the recent Supreme Court decisions in White and Caperton, this debate will only intensify. Rather than revisit the arguments for and against electing judges, this Article argues that applying the Mathews v. Eldridge test in cases where a litigant’s due process is threatened by an elected judge—a possibility that the Court initially dismissed in White against Justice Ginsburg’s protests, and then took head on in Caperton—will balance First Amendment rights that judicial elections breed against the rights of the litigants that the Constitution protects. …

Demographic Diversity Of State Courts, 2009, Sylvia R. Lazos

Boyd Briefs / Road Scholars

No abstract provided.

Judicial Elections In The Aftermath Of White, Caperton, And Citizens United, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Understanding Caperton: Judicial Disqualification Under The Due Process Clause, Dmitry Bam

Faculty Publications

It is virtually impossible to discuss the Supreme Court’s decision in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. without hearing some variant of the following response: “I can’t believe it was as close as it was.” And it does not matter whether you are chatting with your next-door neighbor who had never thought about judicial ethics in his life or discussing the case with a judicial-recusal expert. Nearly everyone seems to agree: Caperton was an “easy” case and that four justices dissented is an indication that there is something terribly wrong. Not only has Caperton elevated the issue of judicial impartiality …

New York’S Inbred Judiciary: Pathologies Of Nomination And Appointment Of Court Of Appeals Judges, James A. Gardner

Journal Articles

The practice of selecting judges by popular election, commonplace among the American states, has recently come in for a good deal of criticism, much of it well-founded. But if popular election of judges is a bad method of judicial selection, what ought to replace it? Opponents of judicial election typically treat gubernatorial appointment as self-evidently better. New York’s experience with gubernatorial appointment to its highest court, the Court of Appeals, suggests that greater caution is in order. Although New York’s current method of selecting Court of Appeals judges was designed to be wide open and based entirely on merit, the …

Countering The Majoritarian Difficulty, Amanda Frost

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Most state court judges are elected to office, and thus must be attentive to voter preferences just like other elected officials. Critics of judicial elections fear that subjecting judges to majoritarian pressures jeopardizes the rights of disfavored groups and undermines the rule of law, and accordingly call for their abolition. The reality, however, is that judicial elections are firmly entrenched in thirty-eight states, and thus appear to be a permanent part of the legal landscape. This article suggests that the so-called “majoritarian difficulty” posed by elected judges can be tempered by regular interactions with appointed, life-tenured federal judges, who are …

Are Appointed Judges Strategic Too?, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the appointive systems of many states by arguing that judges who owed their jobs to politicians could never be truly independent. Because the judiciary could function as a check and balance on the other governmental branches only if it truly were independent of them, the reformers reasoned that only popular elections could ensure a truly independent judiciary. Using a data set of virtually …

Money, Politics, And Impartial Justice, Joanna Shepherd

Faculty Articles

A centuries-old controversy asks whether judicial elections are inconsistent with impartial justice. The debate is especially important because more than 90 percent of the United States’ judicial business is handled by state courts, and approximately nine in ten of all state court judges face the voters in some type of election. Using a stunning new data set of virtually all state supreme court decisions from 1995 to 1998, this paper provides empirical evidence that elected state supreme court judges routinely adjust their rulings to attract votes and campaign money. I find that judges who must be reelected by Republican voters, …

A Plea For Reality, Roy A. Schotland

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legend has it that a long-ago Chief Justice of Texas said, “No judicial selection system is worth a damn.” This view has been all but proven by American experience; nothing else in American law matches this subject in terms of the volume of written debate and endless sweat spent working for change. The selection system for federal judges is unchanged but far from untroubled, and

the States have never used a common method . . . . [O]ne can identify almost as many different methods . . . as there are States in the Union . . . . Moreover, …

The Endless Judicial Selection Debate And Why It Matters For Judicial Independence, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In this overview, I begin by describing the five different systems of state judicial selection that have evolved out of a perennial struggle to strike an optimal balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. I then explore recent developments that have intensified that struggle, before analyzing, with reference to available research, how different selection systems counter or accommodate such developments. My purpose here is not to write (another) position piece. Rather, my purpose is to step back and contextualize disputes over judicial selection with reference to the independence and accountability issues that animate them, and to isolate what we know …

Methods Of Judicial Selection And Their Impact On Judicial Independence, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Irony Of Judicial Elections, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

Judicial elections in the United States have undergone a dramatic transformation. For more than a century, these state and local elections were relatively dignified, low-key affairs. Campaigning was minimal; incumbents almost always won; few people voted or cared. Over the past quarter century and especially the past decade, however, a rise in campaign spending, interest group involvement, and political speech has disturbed the traditional paradigm. In the "new era," as commentators have dubbed it, judicial races routinely feature intense competition, broad public participation, and high salience.

This Article takes the new era as an opportunity to advance our understanding of …

Making Judicial Recusal More Rigorous, James J. Sample, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The right to an impartial arbiter is the bedrock of due process. Yet litigants in most state courts face judges subject to election and reelection – and therefore to majoritarian political pressures that would appear to undermine the judges' impartiality. This tension has existed for as long as judges have been elected (and, to some extent, for as long as they have been appointed, in which case campaigns often take a less public but equally politicized form).

In recent years, however, this tension has become more acute. Today, state courts around the country increasingly resemble – and are increasingly perceived …

The Best Defense: Why Elected Courts Should Lead Recusal Reform, Deborah Goldberg, James J. Sample, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, we have seen an escalation of attacks on the independence of the judiciary. Government officials and citizens who have been upset by the substance of judicial decisions are increasingly seeking to rein in the courts by limiting their jurisdiction over controversial matters, soliciting pre-election commitments from judicial candidates, and drafting ballot initiatives with sanctions for judges who make unpopular rulings. Many of these efforts betray ignorance at best, or defiance at worst, of traditional principles of separation of powers and constitutional protections against tyranny of the majority.

The attacks are fueled in part by the growing influence …

Why Judicial Elections Stink, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Those who are concerned about judicial independence and accountability in the United States quite rightly focus their attention on state judicial election campaigns. It is there that the most sustained and successful efforts to threaten judicial tenure in response to isolated, unpopular judicial decisions have occurred; and it is there that escalating campaign spending has created a public perception that judges are influenced by the contributions they receive. Attempts to address these problems have been undermined by four political realities that the author refers to as "the Axiom of 80 ": Eighty percent of the public favors electing their judges; …

Publicly Financed Judicial Elections: An Overview, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.