Selecting Oregon’s Judges

The cause of reform in the name of “judicial independence” found its Paul Revere in the retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who has rung the tocsin from Washington’s Georgetown University in the East to Washington’s Seattle University in the Pacific Northwest, where she gave the keynote address at a conference on state judicial independence. I participated in the Seattle conference, as well as another conference soon thereafter in Salem, Oregon, in celebration of the Oregon Supreme Court’s 150th anniversary. These were lively discussions before public audiences rather than presentations of scholarly papers (of which there have been many in recent years). These pages summarize a few personal observations on the topic of redesigning state judicial selection.

They reflect experience with only Oregon’s courts.