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Public Funding Of Judicial Campaigns: The North Carolina Experience And The Activism Of The Supreme Court, Paul D. Carrington
Public Funding Of Judicial Campaigns: The North Carolina Experience And The Activism Of The Supreme Court, Paul D. Carrington
Faculty Scholarship
In recent years, the problem of selecting judges to sit on the highest state courts has become a national crisis. North Carolina remains among the states whose constitutions require competitive elections of all its judges. Presently, all candidates for its judicial offices must first compete for election in a non-partisan primary, a system motivated by the desire to maximize the power of the state’s citizen-voters to choose their judges and hold them accountable for their fidelity to the law. Some observers have continued to celebrate such judicial elections as an honorable democratic empowerment, while others have not. The disagreement has …
The Law And Policy Of Judicial Retirement, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
The Law And Policy Of Judicial Retirement, Mitu Gulati, Stephen J. Choi, Eric A. Posner
Faculty Scholarship
Lifetime tenure maximizes judicial independence by shielding judges from political pressures, but it creates problems of its own. As is widely known, judges with judicial independence may implement their political preferences or shirk in other ways. Less attention has been given to another problem: that judges will remain in office after their abilities degrade as a result of old age. The U.S. federal system addresses these problems in an indirect way. When judges’ pensions vest, they receive a full salary regardless of whether they work or not; thus, the effective compensation for judicial work falls to zero. Judges can retire, …