Professor James Gibson has been a prolific author about judicial campaigns and has an interesting article in Campaigns & Elections. The article begins as follows,

How dangerous is campaign activity to the legitimacy of American courts? Here is what one of the most prominent analysts of campaigning and elections predicted back in 2002:

“The spread of negative campaigning in judicial races is likely to have adverse consequences for the court system,” Shanto Iyengar wrote in an Indiana Law Review article. “The motives of judicial candidates will be cast into doubt, and public esteem for the judiciary will suffer. Not only will candidates for judicial office be equated with ordinary politicians, but the impartiality, independence, and professionalism of the judiciary will also be called into question. Large-scale advertising in state judicial elections will further politicize state courts in the eyes of the public.”

If this scenario did indeed come to pass, the American state judiciaries—the workhorse of litigation in the United States—would be seriously undermined and compromised. Because the empirical evidence necessary to substantiate these fears is so limited, this study was conceived and executed. What follows is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, “Judicial Elections: The Surprising Effects of Campaigning on Judicial Legitimacy.” My goal was to examine the consequences of electoral activity with a research design tailored to answer some of the key empirical questions about elections and legitimacy.

 

For the full article see: http://www.campaignsandelections.com/magazine/us-edition/346962/do-judicial-elections-really-stink.thtml