The Cycle of Judicial Elections: Texas as a Case Study

This Article addresses the concerns about the implications of an elected judiciary. Advocating for overall reform, the Article presents Texas as a case study. It tracks the cycle of change in Texas, from party appointments to the bench to two-party competition and back towards one-party dominance. The Article discusses the problems these changes caused and addresses the attempted reform efforts

A Plea for Reality

Legend has it that a long-ago Chief Justice of Texas said, “No judicial selection system is worth a damn.” This view has been all but proven by American experience; nothing else in American law matches this subject in terms of the volume of written debate and endless sweat spent working for change. The selection system for federal judges is unchanged but far from untroubled, and the States have never used a common method . . . . [O]ne can identify almost as many different methods . . . as there are States in the Union . . . . Moreover, most States have changed the way they choose judges at some point in their history, often more than once. My focus is on judicial elections. Since I began work on them, I have adhered to agnosticism about methods of selection. One reason is this: My writing and work aim at making a difference, but to say anything new on this subject seems almost impossible, and for the last generation the battles to change selection methods have been futile. Of course past performance is no predictor of the future, but, as the chief justices formally resolved two years ago, “elections will stay in many and perhaps all of the states that have that system.” People who advocate ending contestable elections always point to some pending bill in some state (lately, Nevada), but for over one hundred years, the hurdles in turning proposals into constitutional amendments have been all but insuperable. The endless debate does have new elements. Some “merit” systems have recently suffered unusual confrontations between governors and nominating committees. Also, we have new analyses drawing upon the actual operation of “merit” systems to argue that some are dominated (or even controlled) by the organized bar and that at least some actions have been partisan. Further, unless the Tennessee legislature does this spring what it refused to do in 2008, its “merit” system for appellate judges will terminate in June 2009. This would be the first time for any jurisdiction to return to contestable elections after ending them

An Analysis of the 2004 Nader Ballot Access Federal Court Cases

The article begins by stating that voters ability to vote for minor party candidates for presidential elections have generally been protected by federal courts as long as they have gotten some media exposure, and Ralph Nader, after not having received this protection attempted to file for injunctions in federal courts. It then goes through Naders claims and suits, including against a discriminatory number of signatures, whether out of state circulators may work, his North Carolina and Ohio write-in lawsuits. The articles conclusion is that federal courts did a poor job in deciding whether to grant Nader injunctive relief and how their decisions go against the essence of a democratic society which should be allowed to vote for whomever they want

A Defense of Student Government

The Texas Orato

Disenfranchisement of the College Student Vote: When a Resident is not a Resident

The standards used by state and local election officials to determine whether students may vote as residents of the communities in which they attend college vary significantly among the fifty states. Two fundamental rights conflict in determining whether college students should be entitled to vote as residents of their college communities: the right of students to equal protection of the laws and eh right of states to limit the right to vote to bona fide residents. This Comment demonstrates the need for the education of election officials and college students in the common law principles of domicile. Moreover, it will conclude that uniform voting residency standards and more efficient and comprehensive absentee-ballot voting systems are essential to the effective enfranchisement of students, a major congressional consideration in the passage of the twenty-sixth amendment

When It Comes to Money in Elections, It Doesn\u27t Matter Which Paris You Live In

In this thesis, I argue how money influences election outcomes in the Texas Legislature from 2010 to 2018. I explore the political history of Texas, where scholars have long alluded to the role of wealthy elites in the political process. Using an investment theory approach, where money is considered a powerful determinant in elections over other factors, this thesis will analyze total disbursements and vote totals of Texas senate and house candidates in a linear model. Along with this bivariate correlation, this thesis will conduct a multilevel analysis that includes partisanship and regions in Texas. This thesis found a strong relationship between money and election results in the Texas Legislature, adding to campaign finance scholarship that found similar results in the United States and France. Overall, these findings confirm the strong role of money in politics and how Democrats are showing signs of being competitive in the Lone Star State

Democracy, Race, and Multiculturalism in the Twenty-First Century: Will the Voting Rights Act Ever be Obsolete?

Part I of this essay begins one hundred years before the passage of the Act, with Reconstruction. I briefly canvas the interracial alliances of the Reconstruction and Redemption periods, underscoring that American democracy has been most responsive to the masses, including working class whites, when interracial alliances between whites and blacks commanded majority power. I then recount how a politics of white supremacy animated and perpetuated racial schisms between blacks and whites for a century in the South. Part II describes how the Act came to be passed, emphasizing the role of protest and coalition politics in its enactment, and the dramatic impact of the Act in fostering active participation by communities of color in American politics. Part III explores the opportunities and challenges presented by growing diversity of the electorate, underscoring the modem manifestations of historic racial divides in American politics. There is a continued, albeit less pronounced, strain of race loyalty in voting patterns that we have not yet vanquished