Court invites meddling in judicial elections

The perverse consequences of judicial elections mount.

The Supreme Court has ruled that "[e]lected judges must disqualify themselves from cases involving people who spent exceptionally large sums to put them on the bench."

That may not sound so bad, but the decision appears to create an ill-defined standard of "disproportionate influence" that could actually encourage further meddling in judicial elections:

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in a decision that split along familiar ideological lines, said the Constitution required disqualification when an interested party’s spending had a “disproportionate influence” in a case that was “pending or imminent.”

Monday’s decision concerned an extreme case, and it announced a vague and general standard that will be refined and applied in the lower courts. The justices in the majority said they did not intend “unnecessary interference with judicial elections.”

But the four dissenting justices predicted that the decision would generate a flood of groundless recusal motions and undermine confidence in the judiciary.

As I wrote back in February, such a standard could have a host of unintended consequences:

[A] ruling that judges have to recuse themselves in such cases could have the perverse effect of drawing more money into the system. Attorneys, companies, and individuals might choose to make large contributions as an insurance policy so that they would have a basis to demand recusals by ideologically hostile judges in future court cases.

Imagine that you are a business or individual want to influence a state supreme court and you have large amounts of money at your disposal. This ruling may prevent you from directly obtaining favorable rulings from justices you help elect in cases to which you are a party. But you can still help put someone on the court who is ideologically sympathetic to your beliefs. And if your preferred candidate loses, you can challenge the winning justice as biased against you and try to get them removed from any case to which you are a party. It's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.

(Unfortunately, there's no good solution to these problems other than eliminating judicial elections, which is generally impossible as a political matter.)

Comments

[News Reference]

This was a simple case of the right wingers on the Supreme Court saying it was okay to buy judges and the left wingers with the support of Kennedy saying that you can NOT buy judges.

The case was about a guy who spent $3 MILLION dollars to help get a Judge elected that was to oversee the same guys court case where he had $50 million dollars to lose.

In political terms that's called corruption. In business terms that's called an investment.

The right wing Supreme Court Judges decided that corrupt business investments in getting Judges elected that would subsequently oversee your multi-million dollar court cases was just fine.

Well, no, it's corruption.

And the right wingers on the Supreme Court clearly voted for corruption.

Shameful.

[Jinchi]

And if your preferred candidate loses, you can challenge the winning justice as biased against you and try to get them removed from any case to which you are a party. It's a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.

Sorry, but that simply makes no sense.

Here's the current system: A company with a legal battle donates millions of dollars to have a hostile judge defeated and to elect a judge of their choosing in his place. The new judge proceeds to vote in the company's favor. Everybody sees it as at best an attempt to rig the system.

That is far more corrupt than the hypothetical you offer, because virtually no-one would fault a judge for ruling in a case against a party from whom he didn't accept money. The bias in your hypothetical is entirely on the side of the defendant.

And the defendant would lose all credibility because it would look like they were complaining that the judge wouldn't take a bribe.