Judicial Selection Updates
Posted by judicialethicsforum on Friday, May, 11, 2012
The great Malia Reddick, now the Director of the Quality Judges Initiative at the IAALS at Denver University, pulls together an interesting running collection of judicial selection news across the states. Topics include merit selection bills, retention election battles, campaign spending, and many more.
For the collection, click here. To sign up for email updates, click here (and choose Selection Snapshots Newsletter).
The Judicial Ethics Forum (JEF) 
lawmrh said
It took a bit of searching through several pages of the high-minded and vague academic claptrap on the IAALS website to confirm its role as another apologist for the Missouri Plan, which irredeemably subordinates judicial accountability for the presumed higher virtue of judicial independence. I think both values: independence and accountability must be respected.
Unfortunately, thanks to retention rates in the 99th percentile across all merit selection/retention election jurisdictions, only judicial independence remains ascendent while judicial accountability functions merely as a modestly embarrassing non sequitur for merit selection/retention election advocacy groups like IAALS.
On a positive note, empirical inquiry is laudable, given the grossly deficient state of corroborative data in support of the proposition that merit selection/retention has conclusively produced better judges. To proponents’ inestimable chagrin, existing data has not provided such support.
Furthermore, judicial evaluation commissions have been mostly and lamentably derelict in their duties having enshrined a largely opaque, counter-intuitive process of near-perfect judicial evaluations. Rare, indeed, if non-existent, is a non-retention grade.
Coupled with increasing voter ‘roll-off’ (voters who rather than vote ‘yes/no’ on judges they know nothing about – – don’t vote), the Missouri Plan and its permutations have institutionalized de facto lifetime tenure.