Judicial Selection Revisited

John Baer has an interesting column on judicial elections, noting that, when looking at a list of yesterday's election winners, that "Nobody's heard of these people" and cites a few instances of judicial corruption.  He thus argues for judicial selection.

The argument that no one knows much about judges rings true, until I consider the logical conclusion of that reasoning, which is that since we don't know much about school board members, county row offices (or even commissioners), township supervisors, municipal tax collectors or auditors, or even state legislator, we shouldn't elect those positions either.

We have debated the issue of merit selection on these pages before and held a forum on the topic.  There wasn't much of a conclusion to that, other than that their is wide disagreement, and that the devil may be in the details of the merit selection process.