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Digging deeper in judicial campaign finances

By Mark Obbie

There's no shortage of judicial campaign stories -- and horror stories -- this election cycle. A two-part story by Mark Lagerkvist at Judicial Reports this week serves as a useful example of smart reporting that goes beyond the usual stories about attack ads and heavy spending. He did that by looking at the incestuous relationship between judges and the lawyers who finance their campaigns. In New York, partisan judicial elections are confined to the lower courts -- the highest court, the Court of Appeals, is appointed -- so Lagerkvist trained his sights on lawyers' donations to incumbents in the trial courts (which in this state are confusing called Supreme Court) and their appellate divisions. In part one, Lagerkvist documented the degree to which lawyers with pending cases will donate to "their" judges by focusing on one law-firm donor and its beneficiary, an Albany appellate justice, with revealing quotes by both to put the eye-popping numbers in perspective. Part two examines the tangle of rules governing the conflict-ridden financial relationships between lawyers and judges. It's too late for the stories to inspire copycat reports by next Tuesday. But they should make it onto every editor's to-do list for the election aftermath, or at least for the next trip to the polls.

Full post as published by Lawbeat on November 01, 2008 (boomark / email).