Category: judicial selection

South Carolina faces internal dissent over its judicial selection process

New York is not the only state suffering though high-profile dysfunction with its judicial selection process. This week, the South Carolina legislature postponed its scheduled judicial elections, and several legislators as well as the governor called for changes to the state’s selection process.

South Carolina is one of only two states that chooses its judges by legislative election. Proponents of this approach have argued that it keeps judges more closely aligned with the values and sensibilities of the people. Opponents argue that it politicizes judicial selection (in that judicial candidates must win over legislators in order to secure their votes) and makes the judiciary subservient to the legislature. Indeed, many states moved to direct judicial elections in the nineteenth century because of concerns about legislative interference with the judicial process. Continue reading “South Carolina faces internal dissent over its judicial selection process”

Progressives win the LaSalle battle, but at what cost?

Last week, the progressives in New York’s General Assembly effectively killed the nomination of Justice Hector LaSalle to be the Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals. As I have documented previously, the opposition had nothing to do with LaSalle’s qualifications or experience, but rather a ginned-up power play over Governor Kathy Hochul. In doing so, they prevented LaSalle from becoming the first Hispanic Chief Judge of the high court.

Identity sure seems to matter to progressives — until it doesn’t.

More broadly, Albany’s progressives are joyfully gutting a coequal branch of government in order to engage in an intramural fight with the governor. The Court of Appeals, in need of a Chief Justice for months, remains without an administrative leader. And the entire state court system has been deprived of leadership with respect to their everyday work.

All New Yorkers should be outraged on this assault on their judiciary. The consequences will become evident soon enough.

South Dakota mulls ending contested judicial elections

The legislative proposal is still in its early stages, and would need voter approval in 2024. It would end contested elections of judges and create a mechanism for formally allowing all judges to be appointed by the Governor. All judges would then face periodic retention elections, during which they would run unopposed and voters would choose to retain them for another term.

The proposal is far less radical as it seems. As this article points out, almost all state judges are already appointed to fill vacancies that occur between election cycles. Indeed, almost no judges actually ascend to the bench in the first instance from a direct election. Removing the requirement of contested elections is therefore as much a housekeeping measure as anything else.

It’s also an excellent idea. Contested judicial elections are in fact almost never contested, and when they are they are subject to deep politicization. Retention elections would continue to provide accountability to the voters, especially if it is paired with a robust judicial performance evaluation program.

Let’s see how this plays out. It is a hard thing for voters to give up their franchise, even in elections where there is rarely a decision to be made. But it is a development that bears watching.

New Jersey courts struggle with judicial vacancies

New Jersey’s court system currently has 65 judicial vacancies, leading one lawmaker to propose raising the state’s mandatory retirement age for judges in order keep exising jurists on the bench.

Like many states, New Jersey currently requires its judges to retire at age 70. But a mandatory retirement system presumes that the state will quickly fill judicial seats as they become vacant. In fact, both Governor Phil Murphy and the state legislature have been slow to act on existing vacancies, creating a crisis so significant that nearly eighty retired judges have been temporarily called back into service to help clear the caseload backlog.

State Senator Shirley Turner is proposing raising the mandatory judicial retirement age to 75. It is a stopgap measure, to be sure. The only way to solve the crisis is for the other branches of state government to take their nomination and confirmation responsibilities seriously.

The situation in New Jersey perfectly illustrates the resource challenges that court systems must navigate in the 2020s. The heightened politicization of every aspect of American life has led the executive and legislative branches to treat each judicial vacancy as an zero-sum partisan event. (See the current kerfuffle in New York.) Meanwhile the courts, unable to secure the human resources they need to address their dockets and unable to control the flow of cases into the system, have to resort to recalls and other strategies to keep up with their workload. No wonder public confidence in every branch of government is in decline.

Former judges, former governor, opposition party all call for Justice LaSalle to get a fair vote

Justice Hector LaSalle’s nomination for Chief Justice of the New York Court of Appeals has received additional support from a wide range of sources, including a dozen former judges, former Governor David Paterson, and some members of the Republican minority in the New York General Assembly. LaSalle’s nomination is currently being held up by partisans and progressive activists in Governor Kathy Hochul’s own party.

If Justice LaSalle is not the man for the job, by all means let that be reflected in debate and a final vote. But to try to sink that debate before it begins, especially when his nomination followed a well-structured and established process, is strong-arm politics at its most cynical.

Identity politics and bare-knuckled partisanship tarnish a key judicial nomination in New York

The resignation of New York’s Chief Justice Janet DeFiore a few months ago has given Governor Kathy Hochul an opportunity to appoint the new chief of the state’s Court of Appeals. But an ultra-progressive contingent in the state legislature is turning the appointment process into a circus wholly unbefitting the judiciary. 

Under New York’s judicial selection procedures, Governor Hochul must choose from among the candidates recommended by the state’s Commission on Judicial Nomination. The Commission presented the governor with a list of seven candidates in late November, and she ultimately nominated Hector LaSalle, a longtime Justice on the state’s Appellate Division. That is when the trouble started. Progressive activists immediately rejected Justice LaSalle as one of three so-called “conservative” judges whose appointment would be “unacceptable.” LaSalle’s crime? “[F]requently dissenting from majority opinions [on the appellate division] that reversed criminal defendants’ convictions.”

At last count, the progressives have convinced at least 13 state legislators, including “Democratic Socialist” Jabari Brisport, to vote against LaSalle. This may be enough to kill the nomination.

Given LaSalle’s long and distinguished judicial career, including almost a decade on the Appellate Division bench (where he was appointed by Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo), it is disgraceful to watch his nomination be undermined by the ugliest kind of partisan activism. All the more so because LaSalle comes with the highest recommendations from the New York State Trial Lawyers Association and the New York State Bar Association, two organziations that actually know what they are talking about.

But it gets even worse. Hochul herself does not appear to have chosen LaSalle because of his legal chops, but rather primarily because of his demographic identity. She is apparently set on appointing a Latino to the state’s highest court, and LaSalle was the only candidate on the seven-person slate that fit that bill. So the nomination will go forward to an ugly and uncertain vote, with everything centered on the judge’s ethnicity and activists’ wish lists, and absolutely nothing focused on his judicial skill, experience, temperament, or leadership ability.

What a shame.

New York’s Chief Judge resigns amid ethics probe

Janet DiFiore, the Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, announced yesterday that she will resign effective August 31 of this year. Chief Judge DiFiore leaves with more than two years remaining on her term. She served not only as the chief of New York’s top court, but also as the chief administrator for the state’s sprawling (and often byzantine) court system.

The timing is certainly curious. DiFiore did not specify why she was leaving, other than to vaguely refer to “the next chapter in life.” Speculation is high that her resignation was influenced by a pending ethics probe, in which she is alleged to have attempted to influence a disciplinary action against a former court employee.

Governor Kathy Hochul will appoint DiFiore’s successor.

When senior status becomes political

Josh Blackman has some interesting comments on two federal appellate judges — one a Reagan appointee, the other a Clinton appointee —  who  rescinded their decisions to take senior status after learning, to their dissatisfaction, the identity of the nominees who would replace them. (Note the excellent reporting by David Lat.)

There is something deeply unseemly about this. Two rescissions do not necessarily represent a trend, but as Professor Blackman points out, conditioning senior status on the appointment of a chosen successor would effectively give judges a veto power over presidential nominations. This poses obvious problems for both the general balance of power in the federal government and our Constitutional fabric. 

The question is what to do about it. I see nothing in the governing statute that expressly forbids this type of gamesmanship. But there are certainly some opportunities for soft power responses. For one thing, the President need not kowtow to a judge’s demand for a specific nominee; if President Biden and his successors simply refuse to allow sitting judges to influence the nomination process, the likelihood of particularized conditional declarations of senior status will probably just dry up. 

It’s also possible for powers within the federal court system to respond. Neither the Chief Justice nor the Judicial Conference has coercive power to prevent judges from declaring conditional senior status. But they do have other forms of influence. It is hard to believe that a call from the Chief Justice, or a sternly worded communique from one’s peers about preserving the legitimacy and apolitical culture of the judiciary, wouldn’t make a difference to many on the bench.

To be sure, the federal court system needs judges to take senior status periodically. It is an important means of bringing in new blood and coping with voluminous dockets (since senior judges do not count against each district and circuit’s statutory allocation of active judges). But the internal culture also has to be preserved, and slowing some judges from taking senior status in order to maintain legitimacy is surely the right call.

 

Joe Biden buries the lead on his own judicial nominees

Joe Biden’s Very Bad Week continues with this unnecessarily tone-deaf press release about his latest round of federal judicial nominees. The nominees themselves are outstanding and highly qualified, and most have judicial experience at the state or federal level. Indeed, several of the nominees have been federal magistrate judges, which gives them special insight into the nuts and bolts of common procedures like arraignments (on the criminal side) and discovery disputes (on the civil side). 

But that evidently matters less to the President (and his advisors) than the nominees’ race and gender. The primary focus of the press release is on the number of Latina and Black nominees in this slate. Nothing is said up front about any of their accomplishments (except in very vague and broad language) or (in several cases) their relative youth, assuring the potential for a multi-decade career on the bench. It’s an insult to the nominees, at what should be a great moment in their legal careers, to reduce them to demographic avatars for the purpose of promoting a political agenda.

Let’s give the nominees some of the credit they deserve. Buried deep in the press release, we learn about this slate’s extraordinary diversity of legal experience: on the bench, as both prosecutors and public defenders, in the legal academy, and in private practice in areas ranging from family law to intellectual property. Some even have experience with social work and public education. That range of experience, and the different perspectives is must inculcate, will help the entire federal judicary — both in the courtroom and behind the scenes.

Congratulations to all the nominees.

Ohio Democrats to Democratic judge: Don’t run for chief justice; you could win!

The perverse nature of choosing judges through partisan elections is currently on display in Ohio, where some Democrats see no benefit to a highly qualified member of their own party running for chief justice.

The state’s current chief justice, Maureen O’Connor, is retiring in 2022, and two associate justices of the state supreme court, Patrick DeWine and Jennifer Brunner, are considering running for the open seat. In Ohio, where judges must run in partisan primaries, their party affiliation is well-known. DeWine is a Republican and Brunner is a Democrat. The retiring O’Connor is also a Republican.

Justice Brunner may well make an excellent chief, and she is certainly saying all the right things about serving the people of Ohio. But to some Democratic bean-counters, a Brunner victory only has potential downside.

Here’s why: If Brunner becomes chief justice, her current seat in the state supreme court could be filled by Governor Mike DeWine.* DeWine, a Republican, would presumably appoint a Republican judge to that seat, meaning no net gain on the court for the Democrats. Moreover, if Brunner becomes chief justice, she will only be able to serve one full six-year term before hitting the mandatory retirement age, meaning that she would have to step down from the court after the 2028 election. If she remained in her current position, however, she could in theory stay on the court until 2032.

If you subscribe to the view that judges are simply legislators in robes, maintaining a certain number of (D)s and (R)s on the court is more important than each judge’s skill, integrity, experience, and temperament. But if you view judges as actual people with professional pride and commitments to excellence, treating them as fungible back-benchers is both inaccurate and insulting.

I have no view about who would make the best chief justice for Ohio. But I do know that it has little to do with a forced party affiliation, and much more to do with people skills, administrative capacity, ambition, effort, intelligence, and drive. I hope that Ohioans agree.

* Yes, Mike DeWine is related to Justice Brunner’s opponent, Patrick DeWine. They are father and son, respectively.