Fair and Balanced Selection of West Virginia Supreme Court Justices

Yesterday I explained how I would select West Virginia judges.  How about West Virginia justices?

The last thing I would want would be for the governor (not this governor, but rather governors generally) to have exclusive power to appoint justices.  With only five justices on our highest court and the court’s stranglehold on appellate decisionmaking, West Virginia’s State Supreme Court could easily become dominated by a single governor’s appointments, and the governor could then end up controlling not one, but two, branches of state government.  So much for the fundamental constitutional principle of separation of powers.

By the same token, I’m not keen on the election option either.  The biggest problem: because the U.S. Supreme Court (wrongly in my opinion) equates obscene independent expenditure on elections with core First Amendment free speech rights, judicial seats – like all political seats for that matter – are vulnerable to being bought and paid for by rich lawyers and people like Don Blankenship who have a lot of money.  A secondary problem: I want my justices performing judicial business, not running around the state giving political speeches and eating pinto beans at gatherings of party faithful.

If I had my choice, the lower level judges selected to serve by lottery (described in my previous post) would select one of their own from time to time to continue judicial service as a state supreme court justice for a six year, non-renewable term.

~ by Dennis Taylor on 24 September 2009.