Title: State Legislative Reforms to the Selection, Retention and Tenure of State High Court Judges: The Role of Larger Reform Efforts and Political Uncertainty, 1850-2000 (SES0550434)
Abstract In this project, I will analyze state legislative decisions to alter the selection, retention and tenure of state high court judges from 1850 to 2000. The proper balance between independence and accountability of judges is an enduring topic of interest among scholars of law and courts. While there are numerous historical accounts and normative arguments there are few systematic, theoretically motivated studies of the impetus for these reforms. There is a substantial body of research clearly documenting how the method and timing of selection, retention and tenure affects the kinds of decisions judges render. Judges who are more accountable to a particular institution (or group) are significantly more likely to make decisions that support that institutions goals. Since this choice has such important consequences for the policies that courts render, a better understanding of the political circumstances surrounding these reforms is clearly warranted. This is particularly true since the history of reforms in the states reveals an important question: Why have legislators been so frequently willing to create a judiciary over which they will have less control? The project focuses largely on two explanations for these changes: larger historical reforms and political uncertainty. Most judicial selection and retention reforms are often attributed to larger historical reforms. However, that research is largely anecdotal or relies on single state studies. One goal of this project is to test systematically the effect of these larger reform movements. More importantly, this project also examines the role of political uncertainty on legislative decisions to alter the rules that govern judicial selection, retention, and tenure. An emerging body of research argues that incumbent lawmakers will create more independent judges in order to make it more costly for future lawmakers to change the policies currently enacted. They should be most willing to do this when there is uncertainty about the current regimes future electoral chances. The research design employs pooled cross-sectional time series and event history models of reforms to judicial selection, retention and tenure from 1850 to 2000. Preliminary analysis of state-level switches from partisan to nonpartisan elections (1900 to 1940) is included. In addition, the research design also incorporates historical media accounts and legislative histories to provide rich detail and complement and supplement the statistical analyses. The results from this project will have a broader impact in numerous ways. The project will engage students, both graduate and undergraduate, in the research process. Specifically, the project will support a graduate student for one year, and will provide an opportunity for promising undergraduates to be exposed to academic research. I also intend to incorporate the data obtained from this project in my undergraduate and graduate classes on the judiciary. The research will be presented at national conferences and will serve as the basis for journal publications and a book manuscript. On a wider scale, the data, codebooks and publications that result from the project will be made publicly available to the academic community, policy makers, and policy reformers on my website at Arizona State University. Academics interested in law and courts, as well as those interested in American politics, state politics, and American political development should be interested in the data. It will be the first dataset that couples data on selection, retention and tenure with a wide variety of other state political and historical contextual data. Those who are interested in judicial independence and accountability from a normative or policy making perspective will have a more complete foundation of where these reforms are most likely to occur as well as the efficacy of reform efforts to produce change.
