ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors review a landscape of court reform proposals through the lens of an explicitly political analysis. Although it might have been possible to choose some other analytical approach, they frankly cannot conceive of one that would permit the appreciation of proposals for policy changes that a political analysis in fact affords. The authors argue that building alliances with the professional community is crucial to proposed reforms, and that enlisting Third Branch Advocates is probably necessary but not sufficient for the success of proposed reforms of wide scope. They observe that most proposals for court reform originate with the professionals who operate within judiciaries. M. Puro, P. J. Bergerson, and S. Puro sought to understand this wave of reform by looking for correlations between states' adoption of the merit plan and various measures of the structure of state political institutions; citizens' attitudes toward political officials and institutions.
