This article presents survey data indicating that while campaign contributions and attack ads in judicial elections threaten the legitimacy of courts, policy pronouncements do not.
This article uses post hoc and experimental methods to assess whether public perceptions of courts are influenced by various sorts of campaign activity and concludes that different types of campaign activity (e.g. policy pronouncements and policy promises) have very different consequences.
Article examines whether judges decide cases based strictly on law or whether they fit the law to their preferences; and it argues that, while the options present a false dichotomy, there is reason to prefer the law based model beyond court legitimacy.
This article examines the political realities that cause state judicial elections to fail and proposes a six-point long-term strategy aimed at overcoming popular support for judicial elections, gradually phasing elections out of existence, and replacing them with an appointed mode of selection similar to the federal system.
This article examines whether a candidate’s sex influences the outcomes in judicial elections.
This empirical study examines the factors that predicted campaign spending in 172 contested state intermediate appellate court races from 2000–2006 and finds that the characteristics of the race, institutional factors, and the context of the campaign are all relevant.
This empirical study of judicial campaign expenditures in nonpartisanCaliforniatrial California trial court elections from 1976 to 1982 concludes that when viewed from the systemic level, judicial campaign costs are neither extraordinarily high nor rapidly increasing, and that as compared to expenditures for other political campagins, the costs are insignificant.
This empirical study examines the contributions of incumbency, occupational ballot labels, campaign spending, newspaper and bar association endorsements, voter information pamphlets, and the ethnic and sexual voting cues provided by candidate surnames to the outcomes of the 123 contested primary and run-off elections held for California’s major trial court from 1976 to 1980.
This book thoroughly analyzes all statewide elections held from 1948 to 1974 for justices of state courts of last resort in nonsouthern states and concludes that non-elective judicial selection systems have not dramatically improved the quality of the bench and that partisan judicial elections go a long way toward achieving their accountability goal.
This article argues that while judicial elections have their defects, alternative judicial selection methods often suffer from similar flaws, and concludes that judicial elections are the best way to choose judges because they have one advantage over other methods: accountability.