PROPOSED REFORMS TO TEXAS JUDICIAL SELECTION: PANELIST REMARKS

• Published in: Texas review of law & politics 2019-01, Vol.24 (2), p.307-313
• Main Author: Fitzpatrick, Brian T
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attorneys; Campaign contributions; Election results; Ideology; Methods; Political appointments; Political parties
• ISSN: 1098-4577; 1942-8618

[...]while some of them did not have life tenure, all the States relied either on the legislature, the executive, or both to pick their judges.3 A handful of States still follow the political appointment method today.4 In the early 1800s, States began to switch to partisan elections and away from political appointment; by the time of the civil war, the vast majority of States were using partisan elections to pick their judges.5 And today there are still quite a few States that use partisan elections to pick their judges.6 In the progressive era, after deciding that politics was a bad thing, States developed the idea of nonpartisan elections for judges-taking party identification off the ballot.7 And a number of States today are using non-partisan elections.8 It is close to the most popular method today. Number one, if you have a selection method that relies on the legal profession to pick judges, there will be a good chance that the legal profession is going to pick judges with an ideological distribution very similar to the dotted line-i.e., left leaning. [...]there is concern that the commissions might select judges who are ideologically similar to them instead of ideologically similar to the people of the states.24 But even without the commission, because the pool of judges will be drawn from the pool of lawyers, if states do not pay attention to ideological preferences, the chances are that a randomly picked judge out of the pool of lawyers will tend to be more representative of lawyers rather than the people of the State. [...]if States do not screen the worldview of the potential judges, a State will replicate the current distribution of the lawyers. First of all, in the vast majority of states, the judges are more left leaning than the people. Here, we can test whether selection methods that either rely on the legal profession to pick judges or on non-partisan elections with no ideological screening produce a left leaning skew.