judgesonmerit.org

The Editorial Board at stltoday.com lauds the recent changes made to Missouri’s merit selection plan. A post entitled “Old and improved: Missouri’s excellent non-partisan court plan gets even better” describes the changes to Missouri’s judicial selection system as a means of keeping special interest money out of the judicial selection process. These changes increase public participation in the selection process by allowing members of the public to nominate lawyers for judicial openings, opening candidate interviews by nominating commissions to the public, and making the nominating commissions’ final vote counts public information.

The changes increase transparency in the selection process, and they come in response to critics of Missouri’s system who the Editorial Board describes as a small group of extremists using “their personal wealth and political connections to stack the benches with judges who are more ‘dependable.’” This dependability does not refer to predicting a judge’s manner of ruling, but is instead a way of special interest groups trying to guarantee outcomes through campaign funding. The appearance of such influence is dangerous, even if it does not actually affect the way a judge rules.  

In his speech announcing the new rules, Chief Justice William Ray Price of the Missouri Supreme Court acknowledged that special interest groups can be well-intentioned, but their efforts are more appropriately focused towards the legislative and executive branches of government. The speech also focused on the need for people to believe that courts provide impartial justice. Chief Justice Price’s description of Missouri’s selection process provides an accurate depiction of some of the benefits of merit selection:

[I]t protects judges from undue political and special interest influence while still keeping them accountable to the people. Specifically, it has protected our judicial selection process from being taken hostage by the political-financial-consulting triad that dominates the other two branches of government.

An editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch echoes a warning sounded by Missouri Chief Justice William Ray Price, Jr. last week to the Missouri Bar Association.  Chief Justice Price urged the assembled lawyers to work to maintain the independence of the judiciary.  Without such a defense, he argued:

[T]he judicial branch of government quickly could erode into a commodity that is “bought and sold by the political power brokers of the moment.”

The chief justice warned of special interests “who demand that the courts rule on the basis of their particular ideological views.”

“For them, justice is determined by whether their special cause wins,” he said. “(O)ften they see no further than their own interest” and “know no limits to the extent they will fight or spend money to get their way,” even though it “may destroy the legal system in the process.”

Chief Justice Price urged the lawyers to educate the public about the need for an independent judiciary:

The task, he said, is to “focus the attention of the people of Missouri on the fact that, when they need a lawyer or when they must appear before a judge, the courtroom should not already be tilted against them by some special interest, no matter how rich, no matter how powerful.”

The editorial agreed with the Chief Justice’s assessment, calling it “right on the mark.”  Although the Chief Justice did not comment on the various proposals that have been put forth to amend Missouri’s Merit Selection system, the editorial writers called the efforts to change the system the “greatest single political threat to justice in Missouri.”

The editorial called for lawyers and nonlawyers to work together to preserve Missouri’s judicial selection system.  This makes sense to us — judicial selection is an issue that affects everyone.  That’s why we’ve been working to promote a dialogue in Pennsylvania about whether to change the way we select appellate judges and move from an electoral system to Merit Selection.