Commentary: The Tangled History of Judicial Elections

Summary

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The attorney general of Maryland, Douglas F. Gansler, announced this month that he will urge the General Assembly to pass legislation that would eliminate contested judicial elections for circuit court judges and instead enable voters to decide every 10 years whether a circuit court judge should continue on the bench.

Presumably that decision would be based on the demonstration by the judge during the previous 10 years of the proper judicial temperament, intelligence, strong personal and professional ethics, courage and integrity, experience, education, personality and work habits and attitude suitable to the court's workload and its subject matter jurisdiction, and not the emotional and usual hodgepodge of irrelevant issues that tend to dominate judicial elections.

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Extract

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Commentary: The Tangled History of Judicial Elections

In doing so, the attorney general stated the obvious and existentially verifiable conclusion that "these people don't want to be politicians, they want to be lawyers -- they consider a judgeship the crowning achievement of a legal career."

The Daily Record followed shortly thereafter with a lead editorial endorsing this change, which...

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