ABSTRACT
In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Sandra Day O’Connor, a retired Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, lamented the current state of affairs in American state judiciaries. Referring primarily to the rising costs of campaigns for the state court bench, Justice O’Connor wrote that interest groups “pouring money” into judicial elections “threaten the integrity of judicial selection and compromise public perceptions of judicial decisions.”1 Of course, Justice O’Connor is not alone in her concerns. The American Bar Association has produced a report entitled Justice in Jeopardy, which explicitly calls for the eradication of judicial elections. According to the American Bar Association, “[w]hatever its historic rationale there can no longer be justification for contested judicial elections accompanied by ‘attack’ media advertising that require infusions of substantial sums of money.”2 Joining Justice O’Connor and the American Bar Association are many of the nation’s most influential court reform advocacy groups, including the National Center for State Courts, and a veritable throng of legal scholars in the nation’s leading law schools. In short, there is an increasingly loud clamor in the United States to end the election of judges altogether.
