Fact, Fiction - and Financing From Soros
March 24, 2008
In a contest of fact versus fiction, fiction has lately been getting the upper hand.
You can see this in movies - the latest example being Michael Clayton in which trial lawyers are portrayed as Don Quixotes jousting with evil corporations. A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed took John Grisham to task for The Appeal, a novel that picks up the latest line in trial lawyer apologia by portraying judicial elections as a way for corporations to “buy” judges.
For balance, The Journal followed up with a piece on Saturday from James Sample at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law packed with anecdotes and opinion surveys that see corporate donations to state judicial elections as “justice for sale.”
If this logic holds, then the Brennan Center itself should explain how it can remain uninfluenced by funding from George Soros’s Open Society Institute. And is the fact that the Brennan Center’s chief partner in tracking judicial elections - the Soros-funded group Justice at Stake, the lead dog in opposing state judicial elections - a coincidence?
Critics of judicial elections claim to remove politics by “merit selection.” This does not remove politics from the system. It hides it. On the other hand, a 2005 study by a Harvard researcher found that the direct election of judges is a stronger check on corruption than those selected behind closed doors.
Winston Churchill once said that democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others. The same might also be said about private financing of judicial elections - it has its flaws, but it’s the best way of ensuring that citizens stay engaged in the judicial selection process and preserves their ability to hold judges accountable for their rulings.