nonpartisan election pros and cons

Reality dictates that few people have the time or inclination to vote on every issue. Nonpartisan elections permit candidates to define themselves as individuals, responding to local issues. That’s why we’re such fans of the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP), which offers a forum for the organizations we fund to provide that feedback. With one activist segment of the trial bar now receiving gigantic attorneys’ fees from the states’ suits against the tobacco industry, we may predict a further ATLA-ization of Democratic judicial candidates. Of course, any regulation of judicial campaign fund-raising must meet the First Amendment standards set out in In addition, campaigning for judicial posts can raise tricky questions about the propriety of a candidate's discussion of a legal issue take publicly-funded school vouchers as an example that might well come before the candidate if he wins his race and takes the bench. lead to tensions in the appointment of lawyer members to the commission and in the actual [judicial] selection process. I spend a lot of time talking to people across the country about our work at The Center for Election Science to strengthen democracy. We raise it here to suggest why defense lawyers should not be automatically seen as faithful protectors of the interests of businesses and consumers on the nominating commissions of Missouri Plan states.The retention elections conducted in Missouri Plan states compare poorly with partisan election contests as a means of ensuring judicial accountability to the public. Indeed, in a 1977 speech Justice William Brennan famously urged state supreme courts to keep the Warren Court's agenda alive and growing. If businesses could get this message through to the public -- and there is strong evidence in some states that it is beginning to get through, as described in Section IV, below then the populist bug-bear that some Missouri Plan advocates use to frighten the business establishment into supporting such reforms would prove less fearsome.Conversely, the nominating commission route has likely failed to live up to businesses’ expectations. If the lay, the professional, and even the political inputs built into the Missouri Plan do not work as advertised, and if the plan in general cannot be shown to produce superior judges, what is left of the argument?

Every two years, we elect representatives to the federal and state House of Representatives and some senators at both levels. Instead, we count it as a critical loss of public debate and self-government.The Missouri Plan's combination of committee-level politics and limited voter participation in retention elections has the effect of obscuring the judicial selection process from public scrutiny and debate.

. While business people are now accustomed to thinking of plaintiffs' lawyers as political actors (ATLA and all that), they are probably not as fearful of the "defense" bar. Kaplan notes the increase in large damage awards by Missouri juries, explaining that in 1995 four of the six largest jury verdicts in the country were awarded in Missouri. Included in the first category, among others, are 1) public funding of campaigns, 2) caps on contributions and expenditures, 3) strengthening disqualification rules in cases involving the appearance of impropriety, 4) prohibiting fund-raising in uncontested elections, 5) barring contributions from certain groups, and 6) prohibiting personal fund-raising by the candidate himself. Voters in these two states are in the process of reclaiming their judiciaries from the excesses of the trial bar.Could this have happened in Missouri Plan states? In fact, most of the states that elect judges are relatively conservative. Former plaintiffs’ lawyers and their supporters include the governor, the attorney general and the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.In the House, plaintiffs’ lawyers can count on support from the speaker, the chairman and the vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee and theDemocratic whip.