Rendering Justice, With One Eye on Re-election

Rendering Justice, With One Eye on Re-election

The vote came after a bitter $5 million campaign in which a small-town trial judge with thin credentials ran a television advertisement falsely suggesting that the only black justice on the state Supreme Court had helped free a black rapist. The challenger unseated the justice with 51 percent of the vote, and will join the court in August.

The election was unusually hard-fought, with caustic advertisements on both sides, many from independent groups.

Contrast that distinctively American method of selecting judges with the path to the bench of Jean-Marc Baissus, a judge on the Tribunal de Grand Instance, a district court, in Toulouse, France. He still recalls the four-day written test he had to pass in 1984 to enter the 27-month training program at the École Nationale de la Magistrature, the elite academy in Bordeaux that trains judges in France.

“It gives you nightmares for years afterwards,” Judge Baissus said of the test, which is open to people who already have a law degree, and the oral examinations that followed it. In some years, as few as 5 percent of the applicants survive. “You come out of this completely shattered,” Judge Baissus said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/us/25exception.html?em&ex=1211860800&en=3c888b917e4c6bd9&ei=5087

Great article- but it still stings for those of us in WI who have seen 2 right wing judges elected with out of state money; they replaced really well qualified judges. Electing judges amounted to buying judges.