Legal Elites Defend Judicial Imperialism in Connecticut
May 3, 2011
Three august members of the Connecticut Bar Association’s Fair and Impartial Courts Committee have taken to the op-ed pages to sing the virtues of the state’s system for selecting judges. In Connecticut, you see, a 12-member commission comprised of six lawyers and six politically-connected individuals gathers once a month 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 been blessed by this privileged panel.
If that clubby, insider’s game doesn’t sound very democratic to you, you’re in good company. Founder James Madison wrote in Federalist 39 that it was “essential” for a democratic government to be “derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it.” “Even the judges,” Madison wrote, “be the choice, though a remote choice, of the people themselves.”
Yet to our legal eagles, any attempt to balance judicial independence with accountability represents a “virus” that “takes the form of assaults” designed to “influence the outcomes of cases based on the passions of the moment or on temporal political winds.” These assaults “constitute an evil for which lawyers and citizens alike must be on guard.” They even see fit to pompously lecture legislators, who must confirm judicial appointments, over what questions are appropriate and which ones cross the line. Well!
Everyone agrees judges should be independent and no one wants prospective jurists handing out potential decisions in certain cases like so many campaign promises. But it is hardly an affront to judicial independence to have ordinary citizens or their elected representatives involved in the selection process, either through elections of an unrestricted appointive process. Like so many “merit” selection supporters, what these three lawyers really want is not judicial independence but judicial imperialism – where judges are free to rewrite laws and shape society to their own ideological preferences, and the people be damned.
Call to Open CT Star Chamber
May 5, 2010
Last week I posted on Connecticut’s judicial selection process which takes place in secret in the elite confines of the New Haven Lawn Club.
Today’s Connecticut Mirror publishes a commentary by Dennis Riley, a long-time public servant and veteran Connecticut journalist. Riley calls for Connecticut’s Judicial Selection Commission to come out from behind closed doors and make all of their deliberations public. Riley writes:
I don’t subscribe to the theory that opening the JSC to public scrutiny will adversely impact the caliber of candidates seeking appointment to the state bench. Judicial appointments are the public’s business–through every phase of the process. It is the taxpaying public that finances those jobs and taxpayers have a right to know all about the process.
Riley’s voice is an important one, as he himself once served on Connecticut’s JSC. And I agree with Riley that taxpayers have a right to know how their judges are selected. Of course, I believe the best way to make judicial selection open to the public is through democratic judicial elections.
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. Read more
AG Blumenthal: Lawsuits “Create Jobs”
March 4, 2010
Carter Wood over at Point of Law posted a little gem yesterday. Wood reports that Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut’s long-time attorney general and now a candidate for governor, recently made the extraordinary claim that all those lawsuits he’s filed over the years “actually create jobs.” Well, knock me over with a feather.
For those interested in something closer to the actual truth, I refer you to a report that Pacific Research Institute’s Lawrence McQuillan authored. McQuillan’s study catalogs the devastating impact of excessive litigation on our economy - including thousands of lost jobs.