JOHN BRUMMETT: Just a little dab'll do

The Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, which is mainly lawyers who file lawsuits, wants to continue electing the state appellate judges.

What these trial lawyers want in the way of reform of judicial elections is to prevent or somehow restrict "dark money." That's the money spent, without regulation, by stealthy out-of-state interests.

Trial lawyers could better compete in the judicial campaign arena if pitted head-to-head only with the devil they know, meaning domestic opposition. Mainly that would be the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, which generally represents people getting sued.

That's what state Supreme Court races largely come down to: Money from suing lawyers versus money from defending businesses.


To be clear: The Trial Lawyers Association doesn't endorse or make group contributions. Its members act individually, such as John Goodson, renowned class-action lawyer.

He supported his wife, Courtney Goodson, for chief justice of the Supreme Court. And he got outspent by some out-of-state outfit comprising unknown associations attacking her for taking money from the trial-lawyer likes of him. And she lost.

I cite that simply as a relevant example.

But justice--so they say--is for all. Or ought to be. And that's the reason we shouldn't elect appellate judges, but appoint them in some kind of merit-selection process that might begin to transcend narrow special interests and more appropriately serve justice for all.

The imperfection would be less, at least. The odor would be fainter, at least.

Bob Edwards, the president of the trial lawyers' group, told a legislative committee last week that we should continue to let the people elect their judges. He reasoned as follows: Since we trust the people to sit on juries and decide legal cases, then we ought to trust them to pick their judges as well.

It was one of those statements that seemed profound unless you thought about it.

Relying on the people to decide cases on juries and to pick judges in elections would be similar in principle only in one of these instances, neither of which exists, or ought to exist:

1.We elected judges by having voters assemble in confined spaces 12 at a time to stay there as long as it took to hear directly from the competing candidates presenting themselves and their cases under rules of evidence as enforced by a presiding judge, subject to appeal to a panel of judges, all of whom would have been picked themselves by a majority vote of 12-member subsections of voters.

Or...

2.Juries would sit in their boxes and decide murder cases and lawsuits based solely on their viewing of attack-ad television commercials, some of which would be paid for by persons well outside the courtrooms and of curious interests and whose identities would be unknown to the jurors.

We shouldn't dare toy with the jury system. It is the best system of justice known to man. And we shouldn't toy that much with the electoral system. We should keep it for offices that exist to serve the will of the people. But it shouldn't apply to positions that exist to protect the rule of law and provide justice.

The people can sometimes form mobs and defy the rule of law and justice. See Little Rock, 1957. See Alabama and Mississippi, generally.

The founders ... you know, the ones everyone likes to quote--they gave us appointed, not elected, judges.

Alas, the idea of appointing appellate-level judges seems to be going nowhere fast in Arkansas.

Our elected judges tend to be against it, probably because they'd never be judges on a merit system. And the elected state legislators who'd have to refer a constitutional change to the people are fearful of implying to the voters who elected them that the voters have limitations in their expertise and should be constrained in their democratic authority.

But there does appear to be a bit of momentum to require disclosure of donors to groups spending "dark money," although even that was opposed at the aforementioned legislative hearing by an Arkansas minion of the Koch brothers.

That would be David Ray, who heads Americans for Prosperity in the state and formerly was a Koch brothers' agent in a different but related form as spokesman for the Tom Cotton campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Ray said that disclosing the names of donors to politically active groups would invade the privacy of those donors. He said transparency should be applied to government, not to persons exercising free expression to influence government.

By that reckoning, no campaign contribution of any amount or in any form should be ever disclosed as a requirement of law.

Privacy in political expression--it's an interesting concept.

I think I'll ask the editors to start running this column without a byline or mug shot.

All over the state readers will be wondering the identity of that masked master of profundity.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 04/05/2016

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