Tennis, Anyone?
April 28, 2010
Q: What’s the first question Connecticut’s Judicial Selection Commission asks prospective judges?
A: How’s your backhand?
Once a month, 12 grandees, mostly from Connecticut’s legal establishment, but also a few with high-placed political friends, gather at the New Haven Lawn Club’s “stately Georgian mansion” to screen judicial candidates before serving up a list of approved choices from which the governor must choose.
If you thought a “lawn club” was a place to buy weed spray and fertilizer for your grass, don’t bother to apply. You’re thinking of Sam’s Club. No, the New Haven Lawn Club, according to its website, is “a prestigious establishment” founded back in the late 1800s to “cater” to Connecticut’s “elite class” and the “upper crust of New Haven.” Today’s members enjoy tennis, swimming and squash, along with a monthly bridge night.
So what’s it like to spend an afternoon mixing with New Haven’s “upper crust?” “It’s a grueling day,” a former commissioner/legislator/lobbyist told reporter Mark Pazniokas, formerly with the Hartford Courant and New York Times, now with the Connecticut Mirror. I’ll bet.
Pazniokas also reports the commission has been the subject of some controversy lately. It seems there’s been complaints about a lack of diversity among the commission’s nominees for the bench. This year’s slate of nine white nominees was held up by the legislature’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus, which tried to find out if any minority candidates made it through the screening process at the “stately Georgian mansion.”
Like other “merit” selection states, however, the deliberations of the commission are kept secret from state legislators – and, needless to say, the public. Rep. Michael Lawlor, co-chairman of the legislature’s Judiciary Committee, is trying to push the door open a crack by sponsoring legislation that would force the commission to release “demographic information about [the] race and gender” of judicial candidates.
As readers of American Courthouse remember, Connecticut is just the latest “merit” selection state to run into problems over the lack of diversity of its judicial nominees. About a year ago, Florida’s NAACP filed a blistering Amicus Brief with the Florida Supreme Court charging “the specter of racial discrimination has been raised” by that state’s “merit” panel.
And in Maryland one month ago, the Legislative Black Caucus blocked efforts there to institute “merit” selection for circuit court judges.
Maybe Rep. Lawlor should go whole hog and require the commissioners to come out from behind their clubby confines and actually meet in public, so Connecticut citizens could see the mysterious process by which the public servants who control one-third of their state government are chosen.
At any rate, it would be hard to come up with a better example to illustrate how “merit” selection has become elitist, unaccountable and undemocratic. Some things are truly beyond caricature.
Posted by Dan Pero in the categories: Connecticut, Judicial Elections
3 Responses to “Tennis, Anyone?”
[...] American Courthouse: Tennis, Anyone? Dan Pero – 4/28/2010 [...]
[...] week I posted on Connecticut’s judicial selection process which takes place in secret in the elite [...]
[...] to vet potential judicial candidates. This commission meets in secret at the New Haven Lawn Club (I’m not making this up), with no public record of the proceedings. By law, the governor can only pick a judge who has [...]