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The Pros And Cons Of Judicial Selection Methods

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When people think of a good judge they typically think of somebody who is fair, not bias and has some sort of experience. However, in today’s society, particularly in the United States, our judicial selection methods are not made to select judges on their ability to reason well and rule impartially (Carter and Burke, 6). On top of that, judges have no actual training before they become part of the judiciary. The only training they receive is in school when they are studying the law. Sometimes when they pursue an apprenticeship with a judge they also get a little bit more experience or insight into a judge’s job. In addition to judicial selection methods, at the federal level, the president and senate get to appoint seats to judges, in which they will have for life. In my opinion, I think this selection method is good to some extent because I trust that the president and senate have good judgment when it comes to picking judges that will be independent, fair, and accountable. At the state level, electing judges varies from state to state. In …show more content…

For instance, I believe that the federal selection system should not allow judges to have the seat for life. Once a judge reaches the retirement age of 65 they should have to step down. This is because after a certain point of serving as a judge, people start to lose interest or they tend not to care as much. When their age is also put into this situation they tend to not know what is going on. They lose the ability to focus and retain what is happening in a case. I also believe that people wanting to become a judge should have to as a requirement shadow a judge simply to gain experience on how to handle different cases. They must learn how to be a fair mediator when it comes to cases because if not then they will have a two against one situation, which is not good for a judge to be

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In fact the Supreme Court of Illinois established the Commission on Professionalism to promote among lawyers and judge of Illinois principles of integrity, professionalism and civility: to foster commitment to the elimination of bias and divisiveness within the legal and judicial system; and to ensure that those systems provide equitable, effective and efficient resolution of problems and disputes for the people of Illinois. (Rule 799(a). Then going out in the real world seeing it happen, first hand. All I can say is I have been an apart of this great Commission for seven year and we have a lot of work to

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The appointment of judges has become clearly political. It is not uncommon to hear of candidates making statements with regards to contested political issues as well as the use of partisan language. According to (Bannon, 10) “For neutral arbiters, this heightened political temperature risks exacerbating pressures to decide cases based on political loyalty or expediency, rather than on their understanding of the law.” The selection of judges through popular election therefore suffers serious flaws since the electorate tend to base their decisions on charm instead of serious determinants. The results can be that the person elected as a judge turns out to be one who falls short of the glory of this office in terms of experience, legal training and education.

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First, to decrease the impact of implicit bias Kang suggests that his readers expose themselves to counter association in order to counter the stenotype with vicarious exposure. He suggests that in order to break the link we should alter the decision-making of judges and jurors. Judges should doubt their objectivity and begin learning more about unconscious thought processes; this would lead judges to be more skeptical about their own objectivity. We should scientifically educate judges with knowledge about implicit social cognition and judges should undergo early training and take IAT or other measures of implicit bias. Furthermore, jury selection and composition should be improved significantly according to Kang.

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The judicial system in Florida is consists of; district courts of appeal, the supreme courts the county and circuit courts. Florida identifies and selects judges who have are respected in their areas of studies to take up positions in these courts. It is obvious, that for a person to get a position as a judge that he or she has to meet a stringent set of requirements in multiple areas. They must show vast academic knowledge in the legal field, have relevant work experience, and good references. The judicial selection process may vary and change based on the specific needs of the position and the level of government where the position is open.

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Government Institutions in Texas Many people believe the Texas Judicial Branch needs refurbishing for the 21st century. However, the Texas Judicial Branch operates efficiently now because of the way Texas has set up its Judicial Branch and court system. The reason for this is because Texas has structured layers of courts and those layers of courts allow cases ideal time to be heard, which works efficiently and adequately for the court system.

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There are many criticisms surrounding, the jury system currently in use in our Australian legal system, these criticisms have recently been brought into the light over the past few years with many cases, such as the Casey Anthony case where a mother was acquitted of murdering her daughter as the jury stated, after less than 11 hours of deliberation, ‘there was not enough evidence’ when the forensic evidence was clearly stacked against her. This lack of competence by the jurors is a criticism that Lord Denning argued about in What Next in the Law? (1982) he debates that the selection of jurors is far too wide, resulting in jurors that are not competent to perform their task. Lord Denning suggested that the jury party should be selected in much the same process as magistrates are, with interviews and references required, although this initiative has several obvious problems, a more complicated selection process would be much more time-consuming and costly to the Australian tax payer; finding sufficient people willing to take part would prove incredibly difficult and a jury that is intelligent and educated can still be biased, and may be more likely to be so if drawn from a narrow social group. For a trial by jury case to be effective, no bias should exist in the jurors judgments, the jurors should understand clearly their role and key legal terms, and the jury system should represent the community as a whole and its standards and views whilst upholding the rights of the accused and society and remain cost and time effective.

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A judge should be the only one able to decide a person’s fate because they use fact over feelings. For

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Of course, it is true that judges are seen as more professional than a jury; there have undoubtedly been times when even a judge may be blinded by his or her own prejudices. As stated by Joe Anderson in Document D, jurors often do not “buy into science fiction” when faced with an obvious case. In the case of the death of Caylee Anthony, the jurors were not bemused by any ungrounded evidence that could have caused Casey Anthony to be found guilty. Certainly in a case of such popularity it is expected that jurors will often have their own preconceived notions about the verdict, but in the end of this case, these jurors were able to put aside their own opinions and only take the hard facts into consideration. Of course, this is the job of a judge as well, but with just one person judging a trial, it is more likely that he or she will give in to his or her own conception of the case.

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In Texas, the selection of judges and the types of judicial selection processes used in the United States are crucial aspects of the legal system that impact the judiciary’s independence and accountability. Understanding the laws of the selection of judges in Texas and the various methods used across the U.S. provides knowledge about how judges are appointed or elected. This paper will include Texas law regarding the selection of most judges in Texas, the types of judicial selection processes used in the U.S., which selection is the best, and what I would do to engage the political process in Texas to pursue my position. The current Texas laws regarding the selection of judges are partisan elections and merit-based selection. Partisan elections involve judicial candidates running for office with a party label, for example,

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The jury may not be experienced enough and can make fatal mistakes. Not only are the jurors biased, they are inexperienced. As shown in cartoon 1, 2, and 3 (Document E), many of the jurors have no experiences with court and base their verdicts on factors other than what the lawyers are giving them. Examples such as the jurors being dogs, verdict based on appearance, and being distracted with other issues during the court trial. The juror is inexperienced and biased, while the judge is experienced with what is going around during a trial, and they have been trained to be able to see both sides of a story and decide on evidence and

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The main draw to merit selection is the commissions, which “minimize political influence by eliminating the need for candidates to raise funds, advertise, and make campaign promises, all of which can compromise judicial independence” (AJS, 2010, p. 1). Unfortunately, the commissions are the main drawback as well because many people think it is easily politically influenced. New York is a good example to analyze which one of these ideals is true since it changed from partisan election to merit selection in its highest courts, the court of appeals (Becker and Reddick, 2003, p. 25). Remember, merit selection most commonly uses retention elections to retain judges in office, but something unique about New York’s system is they do not use retention elections, which have been shown to be politically influenced like partisan elections (Reid, 1999, p. 68 and 69), subject to change with public opinion (Canes-Wrone, Clark, and Park, 2010, p. 229) , and have a low turnover rate (Carbon and Berkson, 1980, Abstract), like most states with merit selection of some kind. Retention elections have the main purpose of trying

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This shows that term limits in the Supreme Court became more important. For example, if they have more mature members, they would understand the law, and would understand the politics and their decisions on the society. Mr. Ingraham stated

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Where the U.S. tends to do well with the preservation of the Social Contract and our Natural Rights, there are evident holes in the upholding of the Rule of Law. The largest of these holes is judicial bias. As described in the UCONN School of Law’s website, libguides.law.uconn.edu, “although judges are supposed to be impartial, as they promise in their oath… they are human and do harbor implicit biases influenced by their identity and experiences.” The school explains that, since judges use more intuition “than deliberative judging,” their implicit biases are applied to cases. Several times, such as in the case of Justin Bieber’s dropped 2014 DUI case (CNN.com), celebrities and other prominent figures have had their charges eased or even dropped through bias, whereas in the case of a regular citizen, the charges would have been the status quo.

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However, a judge is only one person that majored in criminal cases and crimes. Since judges are not representative of society as a whole, "...the experiences and perspectives of women, minorities and poor and working-class people would be underrepresented in a system in which all cases were decided by judges" (Text 2, Line 34-36). This highlights the importance of the jury system in contrast to a judge for a jury has members who are experienced in society, since they are part of the common people. Also, it clarifies the lower classmen and their experiences, as opposed to a judges upper class experience in society. Moreover, all ideas and views of society are demonstrated in a jury system.

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