Litigation

MO Bar President Rebuts Journal Editorial

By Peter Hardin

Responding to a negative Wall Street Journal editorial, the  State Bar president said Missouri’s  nationally recognized merit selection system has fostered broad public confidence in the state’s  judges.

“No amount of money can keep Missourians from recognizing a bad idea when they see one,” H.A. Skip Walther added in a letter to the editor, saying that critics of the state’ s merit selection system apparently failed to get enough signatures to put a proposal for  partisan judicial elections on the November’s ballot.

The Wall Street Journal editorial had said merit selection results in effective control by one profession–lawyers–over a third of the government, with “little political accountability.”

Walther assailed the “canard” that under Missouri’s method, lawyers control the selection process. In fact, he wrote, lay people have a substantial role on commissions that recommend candidates to the governor, and these nominating commissions  “often choose the most qualified candidates by consensus.”

Walther also recalled a false notion of “accountability” that existed before merit selection was adopted:

“When we used to elect judges, their accountability was not to the Constitution or even the public, but to a small group of powerful men with enough money to have their way, so we abandoned elections for many of our judges in 1940.”

“You can keep your notion of political accountability; we will keep our fair and impartial judges,” Walther concluded in his letter.

Under Missouri’s system, a nominating commission currently submits a slate of three candidates to the Missouri governor, who chooses from that list. The  merit system is used for selecting appellate court judges and trial court judges in urban counties. The judges may be retained or removed by voters later.

Twenty-four states use bipartisan nominating panels to fill Supreme Court seats.  This system is known by many as  the “Missouri Plan,” in honor of the first state to adopt a commission system, in 1940.

The Journal editorial also singled out Justice at Stake for criticism, calling it a staunch defender of merit selection. As noted in the JAS web site’s “Justice at Stake & Judicial Elections” page:

Justice at Stake does not support any one system for selecting judges. … Several reforms we support?like public financing, disclosure of campaign-trail money, and voter guides?actually strengthen and improve systems where judges are popularly elected. Where states choose to appoint judges through merit selection, we support periodic retention elections that allow voters to hold judges accountable, along with commission nominating systems that are transparent, bipartisan, and promote diversity on the bench.

You can learn more about the controversy in Missouri from  earlier Gavel Grab articles or read more about how merit selection works from Justice at Stake’s issues page on the topic by clicking here.

Full post as published by The Gavel on June 07, 2010 (boomark / email).