The Pros And Cons Of Merit Selection

seldom lifetime appointments. Since most of the appointment systems in place are interim positions or at least not lifetime terms, statewide gubernatorial appointment systems are not terrible judicially independent as with the Federal Supreme Court. It is subject to a lot of abuse though, as is the case with the Federal Supreme Court; therefore, it is lacking in the judicial independence aspect of the scale. The final method to be analyzed is merit selection. Merit selection is a relatively new method of judicial selection, and it has a plethora of variations because of this. It also has a plethora of problems which come with it as well. It was created by Albert Kales, one of the founders of the American Judicature Society (AJS), in 1914. The AJS has been pushing for the

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