IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, announced two new publications from its Quality Judges Initiative: Cornerstones of State Judicial Selection: Laying the Foundation for Quality Court Systems and Judges and Leveling the Playing Field: Gender, Ethnicity, and Judicial Performance Evaluation.

The Cornerstones report recommends essential features of judicial selection systems and key roles for governors, legislatures, and citizens in those systems to ensure impartiality, accountability, and transparency in the selection of state judges.

Malia Reddick is the Director of the Quality Judges Initiative and oversaw the production of both reports.

“At IAALS we believe that commission-based judicial appointment, with regular performance evaluation and retention elections, is the best way to ensure impartial and accountable courts and judges,” Reddick says. “However, we also recognize that the constitutional changes required to adopt such methods may not be feasible in some states, so in this publication we have coupled desired attributes for court systems and judges with principles or ‘cornerstones’ for the full range of judicial selection processes to achieve courts and judges of the highest quality.”

The Leveling the Playing Field report evaluates data from four states that have longstanding judicial performance evaluation (JPE) programs (Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah), beginning with the question: is there empirical evidence that women and minority judges are evaluated less favorably than Caucasian male colleagues, as some have alleged?

“What we found is that judges in general receive high marks from court users,” Reddick says. “But there are a few areas in which women and minority judges in these states receive lower scores.”

This publication considers whether these differences are the result of implicit biases and recommends ways to minimize potential implicit bias, including a model process for developing JPE surveys and sample surveys created through such a process.  Copies of both publications are available upon request. You can contact IAALS at http://iaals.du.edu