ABSTRACT

Rising campaign costs and the use of television airtime to advertise in state supreme court elections are widely regarded by judicial reform advocates as among the most serious and pressing threats to the integrity and legitimacy of American state judiciaries. Consider, for example, the following statement from the Justice at Stake Campaign about the 2004 supreme court elections:

Television advertisements are the canary in the coalmine of judicial elections: when they appear, the nasty and costly new politics of judicial elections are not far behind. In the space of four short years, television advertising in state supreme court races has migrated from a handful of battleground states to four of every five states with contested high court races.1