Judicial Elections and Partisan Endorsement of Judicial Candidates in Minnesota

Abstract

All judicial officers in the state of Minnesota, including the chief justice and six associate justices of the supreme court and fifty judges in the district courts, are required to be nominated and elected without partisan designation. Judicial nominations and elections were made nonpartisan by the election law of 1912. During a quarter of a century, the nonpartisan ballot has given Minnesota the services of an exceptionally well qualified bench, and sentiment is practically unanimous in favor of continuing this method of selecting judges.Once elevated to the bench, a Minnesota judge has a good chance of continuing in that capacity as long as he wishes to serve. Supreme court justices have been regularly reelected; so that their tenure has been, for all practical purposes, the same as that of federal judges. Three of the present members of the supreme court have been elected once, two have been elected twice, one three times, and one four times. With one exception, the supreme court justices since 1912 have retired from office by resignation or death.Of the eighty-four district court judges who have served since 1912, only four have been defeated at the polls when seeking reelection. At the present time, thirty-six of the state's fifty district court judges have been elected two or more times, and twenty-three have been elected three or more times.