judgesonmerit.org

Merit Selection of judges in Tennessee involves a 3-part system of Merit Selection, judicial performance evaluation, and retention elections. Judges are nominated for gubernatorial appointment by a 17-member Judicial Selection Commission (14 lawyers and 3 non-lawyer citizens). Appellate judges stand for retention election every 8 years.

The Tennessee Plan has been in place since the early 1970s and is also known as the “Modified Missouri Plan.” It’s “winding down” this year, because the Tennessee legislature failed to reauthorize it, mostly because of allegations of too much secrecy in the meetings of the Judicial Selection Commission.

But the way to address the problems is not to scrap the Tennessee Plan and replace it with elections, says Governor Phil Bredesen — and we agree. Tennessee risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As Governor Bredesen suggests, perceived problems of secrecy and alleged “back-room dealing” can be addressed by amending the statute to require additional public meetings of the Commission. As the Governor explains, putting a worse system in place is not the answer:

The issue is that when you have state-wide elections, basically for appellate judges, the only people who care about those are people with very narrow special interests. They’re expensive elections because they’re state-wide, and I just think you’d have this scramble to have, you know, every interest out there whether it be business or trial lawyers or anybody else trying to elect their judges and we’d have a vastly worse system than we have today.

The problem in Tennessee isn’t secret meetings in smoke-filled rooms. That flimsy accusation is mostly a “smokescreen” itself for the special interests who seek to inject even more politics — and potentially millions of dollars — into Tennessee’s judicial selection system.

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