Through three articles published in the News and Record of Greensboro on October 25, Elon Law professors Scott Gaylord, Andrew Haile, and Alan Woodlief explore the merit of reforming North Carolina's system of selecting judges. A public debate on the subject will be held at Elon Law on October 29.
Reviewing the history of the judicial selection debate in North Carolina, Woodlief, associate professor and associate dean for admissions and administration at Elon Law, notes that while consideration of future reform should be welcomed, North Carolina has taken recent measures to reform the electoral process for judges.
“In 2002, the General Assembly adopted the Judicial Campaign Reform Act, establishing nonpartisan elections for the appellate courts…limiting the amount of campaign contributions, and offering candidates who adhere to strict fundraising and spending limits the option of using public financing during their campaigns,” Woodlief writes. “In so doing, North Carolina became the first state to adopt full public financing of appellate judicial elections and subsequently has been held up as a national model in this regard.”
Haile, assistant professor at Elon Law, acknowledges the value of the public financing system for judicial elections in North Carolina, but argues that the system still requires judicial candidates to raise campaign funds and that the voluntary nature of public financing creates the potential for large infusions of money into the process of selecting judges in the state.
“Money has no legitimate place in selecting judges,” Haile writes. “Judges are not meant to be politicians who reflect the current political mood. Instead, they should be impartial arbiters of justice, willing to make politically unpopular decisions when the law requires. Campaign contributions cast doubt on judges’ ability to do that.”
Gaylord urges careful consideration of the potential disadvantages of an appointment system for selecting judges, before the state makes any changes to the current approach.
“The shift to judicial elections in North Carolina and other states originally was intended, as one commentator has noted, to increase judicial independence by freeing the judiciary from ‘the corrosive effects of politics and … to restrain legislative power,’” Gaylord writes. “For our systems of checks and balances to work properly, the judiciary must be independent of the other coordinate branches of government. That is, a judge must not, as the adage states, simply be a lawyer with a politician for a friend.”
Elon Law’s Distinguished Jurist-in-Residence and Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court (Ret.) James G. Exum, Jr., will debate this issue with Wade E. Byrd, another of the state’s most prominent attorneys and a past-president of the North Carolina Academy of Trial Lawyers, on October 29 at 7:30 p.m.
Click here for details about the debate and for RSVP instructions.
Click on the E-Cast link to the right of this article to read the complete articles in the News and Record by Gaylord, Haile, and Woodlief.