Management Note

Abstract

The quality of our justice in America patently hinges, in large measure, on the quality of our (Special Commission on Evaluation of Judicial Perfonnance, 1995:i). Whether one is speaking of how judges are initially selected to the bench, how judges maintain their posItion, or how sitting judges are assisted in maintaining or improving their perfonnance, this statement is as true today as it was fifteen years ago when it was written in the preface to the American Bar Association's Guidelines for the Evaluation ofJudicial Performance. During the last half of the twentieth century, a number of changes were made to help maintain the quality of judges in the United States. Today, all states require that judges partake in some fonn of judicial education. A number of states provide judges with con­ fidential evaluations designed to help them recognize and improve areas in which their job perfonnance may be ineffective. Perhaps most important, in an effort to have well­ qualified individuals sit as judges, a majority of states have adopted a merit selection sys­ tem of choosing judges as opposed to partisan or nonpartisan popular elections. In 1940 became the first state to name its judges through a merit selection process. Under the Missouri Plan, which is currently used in one fonn or another in at least thirty-four states, a commission made up of lawyers and nonlawyers selects sev­ eral candidates for jUdgeships from whom the governor must choose. To quell the com· plaints of critics of merit selection, states typically require the appointed judge to stand for periodic retention elections in which his or her name is the only one on the ballot and the public can vote on whether or not the judge should be retained. While merit selection has spread since it was first introduced in 1940, critics of the system have correctly noted that voters are given little or no infonnation about the judges