Wednesday, April 29, 2015

"In the early 1970s, four Florida Supreme Court justices resigned from office following corruption scandals."

That was the U.S. Supreme Court today in decising Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar.  From the intro:
Our Founders vested authority to appoint federal judges in the President, with the advice and consent of the Senate, and entrusted those judges to hold their offices during good behavior. The Constitution permits States to make a different choice, and most of them have done so. In 39 States, voters elect trial or appellate judges at the polls. In an effort to preserve public confidence in the integrity of their judiciaries, many of those States prohibit judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting funds for their campaigns. We must decide whether the First Amendment permits such restrictions on speech.
We hold that it does. Judges are not politicians, even when they come to the bench by way of the ballot. And a State’s decision to elect its judiciary does not compel it to treat judicial candidates like campaigners for political office. A State may assure its people that judges will apply the law without fear or favor—and without having personally asked anyone for money. We affirm the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court.
 I'm against judicial elections, but if you are gonna have em, then I think you gotta back the First Amendment and a person's right to ask for campaign contributions even if they are running for judge.  I find myself agreeing with Scalia again:

An ethics canon adopted by the Florida Supreme Court bans a candidate in a judicial election from asking anyone, under any circumstances, for a contribution to his campaign. Faithful application of our precedents would have made short work of this wildly disproportionate restriction upon speech. Intent upon upholding the Canon, however,the Court flattens one settled First Amendment principle after another.
The first axiom of the First Amendment is this: As a general rule, the state has no power to ban speech on the basis of its content. One need not equate judges with politicians to see that this principle does not grow weaker merely because the censored speech is a judicial candidate’s request for a campaign contribution. Our cases hold that speech enjoys the full protection of the First Amendment unless a widespread and longstanding tradition ratifies its regulation.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Judges should not be elected.

Anonymous said...

So quiet, I wonder if you could hear an Order drop?

No Lawyer-Judges said...

Lawyers should not be Judges.

Professor Benjamin H. Barton author of The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System, writes that virtually all American judges are former lawyers, a shared background that results in the lawyer-judge bias. Barton argues that these lawyer-judges instinctively favor the legal profession in their decisions and that this bias has far-reaching and deleterious effects on American law.

http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/law/us-law/lawyer-judge-bias-american-legal-system

Anonymous said...

Boycott the fight!