Court marshals: a panel of legal experts identified Ways to improve North Carolina's courts, without taking sides on how judges are selected.

AuthorHood, John
PositionFREE + CLEAR - Discussion

When N.C. Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin created a commission to study the state's judicial system in 2015, many business leaders assumed the primary outcome would be another round of public debate about how judges are selected.

Judicial selection has been a political issue in North Carolina for decades. Back when the state was controlled by Democrats, they took steps to keep Republicans out of the state's judiciary. The most egregious tactic was the statewide election of Superior Court judges, leaving the few Republican-leaning counties unable to elect local judges of their choice.

As Republicans began winning legislative and gubernatorial races, they pushed to change North Carolina's method for selecting appellate judges from partisan elections to an appointive system. Naturally, Democrats refused. Then, as Republicans began winning those partisan elections for state Court of Appeals and Supreme Court in the late 1990s, Democratic lawmakers took party labels off the ballot for appellate court races. The roles reversed after Gov. Pat McCrory's victory in 2012, and Democrats had a string of judicial-election victories under the new nonpartisan system. Republicans began to favor either gubernatorial appointment or a return to partisan elections. They ended up enacting the latter.

As a member of Chief Justice Martin's North Carolina Commission on the Administration of Law & Justice, I know the topic of judicial selection got a lot of attention. Most of our deliberations occurred during the 2016 election cycle, which made it especially difficult to reach a consensus. In the end, the commission recommended changing how judges and justices are selected and retained without specifying a particular method.

But judicial selection probably isn't the most pressing issue if our goals are to improve the administration of justice, save money for taxpayers and increase public confidence in the system. Providing a fair, orderly and efficient system of courts to adjudicate disputes and protect public safety is a core function of government and...

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