No “Merit” for Minnesota
April 8, 2010
Mark Cohen has a hand-wringer on Minnesota Lawyer blog (h/t GavelGrab) fretting over the “unfettered discretion” the state’s governor has for appointing judges to the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court:
“Minnesota’s only check on the governor’s appointment power is to give voters the chance to vote for someone else in the next election.”
Actually, that sounds like a pretty robust check to me, but Cohen ignores another check. If the voters of Minnesota don’t like a governor’s judicial appointments, they can not only throw the judge out of office, but the governor, too. Because they know voters will be watching, many candidates for governor explicitly campaign on the type of judges they would appoint to the bench.
Contrast that level of public accountability with proposals for replacing Minnesota’s appointment/election hybrid system with so-called “merit” selection, which Cohen seems agnostic about. Under most “merit” selection systems, an unelected committee of elite lawyers meets behind closed doors to select judges, providing a list of acceptable names from which the governor is required to pick. (I realize that Minnesota’s “merit” panel for District Court judges cannot force a governor to choose from its list, but this is highly unusual; in most states the governor is bound by the “merit” commission’s slate.)
Cohen concedes that the current judicial selection system in Minnesota has produced good judges and the state Supreme Court “has maintained its excellent, nonpartisan reputation.” If it ain’t broke, why fix it – especially when the fix would diminish the accountability of judges to the public they serve?