This article explores the effects of the Roberts Court’s recent First Amendment cases on judicial elections. Arguing that the protection afforded speech rights by the Roberts Court actually promotes the independence, accountability, and quality of state court judges.
This article uses the normative theory of popular constitutionalism as a foundation for new arguments for and against an elective judiciary.
This article presents an analytic taxonomy of the arguments for and against judicial election systems, discusses the costs and benefits of elective judiciaries in the “new era” of higher campaign spending and increased interest group involvement, and argues that there is an underappreciated tradeoff between the health of judicial elections and the health of the judiciary.
This article discusses the 2010 Iowa judicial election, in which voters turned out in unprecedented numbers and three justices were removed, in the context of popular constitutionalism and its relationship to federalism and popular sovereignty.
This article analyzes the “Judging the Judges” survey of Nevada attorneys, finding evidence of significant unconscious bias and concluding that judicial performance evaluations, an important part of the judicial selection process, are not valid measures of judicial quality.
This article addresses the issue of judicial accountability by analyzing the election in which three Iowa Supreme Court justices were defeated as a consequence of their participation in a unanimous decision upholding gay marriage.
This article addresses the ongoing debate about judicial elections and proposes measures to combat the troublesome features of elective systems.
This article evaluates merit selection of judges against the founding principles of representative democracy.
This article summarizes the fifty states’ methods of judicial selection and argues for a system that avoids both the undemocratic elitism of the Missouri Plan in selecting judges and the populist dangers associated with retention elections.
This article argues that Key’s concept of “friends and neighbors” politics, which uses the phenomenon of localism to explain voting behaviors, should be extended into the realm of campaign finance.