Tarlton Law Library: U.S. Supreme Court Reform: Merit Selection

Summary

Merit selection proposals seek to mitigate partisan influence in judicial appointment through bipartisan selection commissions and empirical candidate analysis. The practice of merit selection started in the states as a method to determine state supreme court justices. Since then, there have been proposals for the federal judiciary, and even the Supreme Court, to implement elements of merit selection.

Academic Literature

Lauren C. Bell, Federal Judicial Selection in History and Scholarship, 96 Judicature 296 (2013). [HeinOnline]
Rachel Paine Caulfield, What Makes Merit Selection Different?, 15 Roger Williams University Law Review 765 (2010).
Frank B. Cross & Stefanie Lindquist, Judging the Judges, 58 Duke Law Journal 1383 (2009).
Richard B. Saphire & Paul Moke, The Ideologies of Judicial Selection: Empiricism and the Transformation of the Judicial Selection Debate, 39 University of Toledo Law Review 551 (2008). [HeinOnline]
Adrian Vermeule, Should We Have Lay Justices?, 59 Stanford Law Review 1569 (2007).
Daniel A. Farber, Supreme Court Selection and Measures of Past Judicial Performance, 32 Florida State University Law Review 1175 (2005).
Judith Resnik, Judicial Selection and Democratic Theory: Demand, Supply, and Life Tenure, 26 Cardozo Law Review 579 (2005).
Stephen J. Choi & G. Mitu Gulati, Choosing the Next Supreme Court Justice: An Empirical Ranking of Judge Performance, 78 Southern California Law Review 23 (2004).
William P. Marshall, Be Careful What You Wish For: The Problems with Using Empirical Rankings to Select Supreme Court Justices, 78 Southern California Law Review 119 (2004).
WERL, On Tournaments for Appointing Great Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, 78 Southern California Law Review 157 (2004).
"WERL" is the acronym for Washington University's weekly Workshop on Empirical Research in the Law, composed of participants from Washington University's law school, political science department, and economics department
Luke Bierman, Beyond Merit Selection, 29 Fordham Urban Law Journal 851 (2002).
Malia Reddick, Merit Selection: A Review of the Social Scientific Literature, 106 Dickinson Law Review 729 (2002). [HeinOnline]
Lee Epstein, Jack Knight & Olga Shvetsova, Comparing Judicial Selection Systems, 10 William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 7 (2001).
Thomas O. Sargentich, Report of the Task Force on Federal Judicial Selection, 51 Administrative Law Review 1031 (1999). [JSTOR]
A free version of the report that lacks law review formatting can be accessed here
Jona Goldschmidt, Merit Selection: Current Status, Procedures, and Issues, 49 University of Miami Law Review 1 (1994).
William G. Ross, The Supreme Court Appointment Process: A Search for a Synthesis, 57 Alabany Law Review 993 (1994). [HeinOnline]
Carl Tobias, Rethinking Federal Judicial Selection, 1993 Brigham Young University Law Review 1257 (1993).
Michael J. Slinger, Lucy Salsbury Payne & James Lloyd Gates Jr., Senate Power of Advice and Consent on Judicial Appointments: An Annotated Research Bibliography, 64 Notre Dame Law Review 106 (1989).
Theodore Voorhees, It's Time for Merit Selection of Supreme Court Justices, 61 American Bar Association Journal 705 (1975). [JSTOR]

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U.S. Supreme Court Reform

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