O'Connor Judicial Selection Initiative

Two weeks ago, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor sat on a Ninth Circuit panel in Montana and attended a luncheon with a local bar association.  At the luncheon, O'Connor challenged Montana to shift away from electing its state judges, part of her larger, nationwide focus on this issue since retiring.  See here (New York Times op-ed by O'Connor, Take Justice Off the Ballot) and here (Wall Street Journal Law Blog post, Justice O'Connor on Judicial Elections: She's Not a Fan).

Late last year, following a 2006-2009 series of conferences on the judiciary under her name, the retired justice created the O'Connor Judicial Selection Initiative, "to take the next step and begin fostering change directly at the state level."  The Initiative, which the University of Denver sponsors, advocates appointing state judges, subject to retention elections and performance evaluations.  For a color-coded map of states' judicial selection processes from the Initiative's website, click here.  (Justice Ginsburg also opposes electing judges.)

As the Initiative acknowledges, "no selection system is perfect."  For instance, retention elections are not completely insulated from politics, though far more so than traditional elections.  Just last week, there was a call in Iowa to unseat (via a retention vote in November) three state supreme court justices who ruled in favor of same-sex marriage there.  Those three were joined by other justices in the unanimous opinion, but only they are on the ballot this year.

Quote: Why the Federal Circuit Gets Reversed

[The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has] national jurisdiction over patent and customs appeals, appeals from the Merit Systems Protection Board, and claims against the government.  Inasmuch as cases decided by the [Federal Circuit] will not ordinarily present a conflict with another circuit's holdings, [the Supreme] Court has fewer occasions to grant certiorari simply to resolve a circuit conflict.  Our acceptance of a case for plenary review from the [Federal Circuit] is more likely to be based on a serious concern about the correctness of the appellate court's ruling, rather than merely a concern about conflicting circuit rulings.  No doubt, this helps explain why a much higher percentage of the cases we do review from the [Federal Circuit] result in reversals than would otherwise be the case.

Sandra Day O'Connor, The Majesty of the Law 130 (Craig Joyce ed., 2003).