JudgesOnMerit Discovers Sand in the Sahara!
May 7, 2010
OK, so someone must have hacked into the computers over at JudgesOnMerit and posted a parody. How else to explain the breathless headline – “Merit Lives!” – over a post bragging about the budding support for “merit” selection from “unlikely sources” such as … drum roll please … trial lawyers! Who knew!?
At the risk of playing the straight man to those jokers, I guess I should point out the obvious: The reason trial lawyers love “merit” selection is because it gives them a seat (or two or three or four) at the table when the doors close and the secret meetings begin and legal elites get down to the business of picking judges.
In some states, trial lawyers don’t just have seats at the table - they own the table itself.
Take Missouri, for example. In that birthplace of “merit” selection, four of the seven members of the state’s “merit” board have ties to the Missouri trial lawyer association. Up until recently, in Tennessee 75 percent of the “merit” commissioners by law came from legal special interest groups like the Tennessee trial lawyers association.
Maybe it just took Pennsylvania trial lawyers longer than their peers in other states to figure out that “merit” selection is a rigged game that puts them in the driver’s seat when it comes to picking judges.