Money Flooding into Campaigns for State Judgeships-Ginsburg, O'Connor Say Reform Is Needed

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ABC News Exclusive: Study Shows Money Flooding into Campaigns for State Judgeships
Justices Ginsburg, O'Connor Say Fundraising Could Corrupt System, Reform is Needed
By MATTHEW MOSK
March 17, 2010


In rare public remarks last week, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the money involved in electing judges remains one of the most pressing concerns facing the American court system. And she joined her former colleague, Sandra Day O'Connor, in calling for reform.
Brian Ross investigates a campaign ad singled out by judicial election critics.

"If there's a reform I would make, it would be that," Ginsburg said when asked about the issue at the National Association of Women Judges Thursday night.

Yet money has continued to pour into the campaign accounts of state judges around the country, and ABC News has obtained an advanced copy of a study showing the amounts involved are unprecedented.

In the past decade, candidates for state judgeships raised more than $206 million, more than double the $83 million judges raised in the 1990s, according to the soon-to-be released study by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and Justice at Stake, two non partisan groups that advocate for reforming the judicial selection process.

Three of the last five state Supreme Court election cycles topped $45 million. And judges shattered fundraising records in all but two of the 21 states with contested Supreme Court elections in the last ten years, the report found.

"State judicial elections have been transformed," the report says, and the money involved has created "a grave and growing challenge to the impartiality of our nation's courts."

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http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/study-shows-money-flooding-campaigns-state-judgeships/story?id=10120048