Most Countries Don’t Hold Judicial Elections
Most states elect judges, but the practice is not so common in other countries.
The National Center for State Courts says 87 percent of all state court judges face elections and 39 states elect at least some of their judges, the New York Times reports. But in other countries, most judges are appointed or selected through a civil service process.
In France, judge applicants undergo a battery of tests and spend years at a special school, the story says. Jean-Marc Baissus, a district judge in Toulouse, France, told the Times the four-day written test and oral exams that followed result in years of nightmares. “You come out of this completely shattered,” he said.
Only Japan and Switzerland hold some judicial elections.
Hans Linde, a former justice of the Oregon Supreme Court, said in a 1988 speech that observers in other countries are surprised at the American method of judicial selection. “To the rest of the world,” he said, “American adherence to judicial elections is as incomprehensible as our rejection of the metric system.”
Critics say elections and the need to raise money can compromise judges and produce lower-quality decision-makers. But supporters say elections make judges accountable to voters and result in greater transparency.
A working paper issued by the University of Chicago Law School found that elected judges write more opinions while appointed judges write opinions of higher quality. The authors—Stephen Choi, G. Mitu Gulati and Eric Posner—explained the results this way: “Electoral judgeships attract and reward politically savvy people, while appointed judgeships attract more professionally able people. However, the politically savvy people might give the public what it wants—adequate rather than great opinions, in greater quantity.”
Updated at 3:45 p.m. to indicate that Switzerland holds some judicial elections.
