Who is Targeting State Supreme Courts to Limit Our Freedoms

True North Issues New Research Report Detailing Who Is Targeting State Courts to Limit Freedoms

Montana’s Judicial Branch aims to ensure fair access to justice and to foster public trust and confidence in the state’s courts.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law is a nonprofit organization with a liberal or progressive stance, focusing on law and public policy initiatives.

Judicial elections are approaching their second century in the United States, and they are not going away anytime soon. After the rise of Jacksonian Democracy in the early nineteenth century, and popular calls for increased judicial independence from the political branches, most states hard-wired the election of judges into state constitutions. Despite reform efforts that emerged in the twentieth century and continue today, states that hold judicial elections reliably reject alternative selection methods. Nearly ninety percent of state judges in the United States are subject to election.

Montanans never much liked outside influence in their judiciary, and their first line of defense was judicial elections. This may strike us as odd now, in our Citizens United era of unlimited outside money and even national party politics entering our Supreme Court campaigns. Yet the outsider problem and our electoral solution are older than statehood itself. After seeing record amounts of money spent on court candidates in the last campaign, and with three seats on the ballot this fall, it is worth considering where we’ve been and where we’re headed on Montana’s judicial campaign trail.