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Missouri Plan In National Perspective, The, Stephen J. Ware
Missouri Plan In National Perspective, The, Stephen J. Ware
Missouri Law Review
The Missouri Law Review's title for this symposium rightly recognizes the distinction between judicial selection and judicial retention. 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 …
Exporting The Missouri Plan: Judicial Appointment Commissions, Mary L. Volkcansek
Exporting The Missouri Plan: Judicial Appointment Commissions, Mary L. Volkcansek
Missouri Law Review
Debates over the best methods for selecting judges in the United States usually turn on finding an appropriate balance between independence and accountability for judges, but elsewhere the tension between those two competing ends has been resolved in favor of judicial independence. According to Martin Shapiro, judges cannot, though, be truly independent, because they are dependent on those to whom they owe their office. Or, as Jean Blondel sees it, the question becomes one of "from whom should judges be independent?" Judges are, in other words, dependent in some sense on those to whom they are accountable. New democracies and …