From the Chicago Daily Law Bullletin

March 23, 2005

Summit will seek better judicial elections
By DANIEL C. VOCK
Law Bulletin staff writer
SPRINGFIELD — The justices of the Illinois Supreme Court and the state's top bar leaders gave the green light Tuesday to an initiative to collaborate on ways to improve judicial elections.
A group of two dozen bar leaders, judges and reform advocates gathered in a resplendent room at the high court's Springfield courthouse and agreed to hold a day-long event to propose ways to curb the costs and rancor in judicial contests.
The goal is to ''turn the public into advocates for the courts,'' said Cynthia Canary, the executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform.
Canary's group approached Chief Justice Mary Ann G. McMorrow about hosting the ''Illinois Judicial Convening,'' possibly as soon as late summer. The ICPR came up with the idea based on similar efforts in New York and Ohio.
McMorrow and the other members of the high court agreed to explore the possibility, which was the purpose of Tuesday's meeting. By the end, all of the participants had agreed to move forward.
The group included the presidents of the Illinois State Bar Association, The Chicago Bar Association, the Illinois Judges Association, the Women's Bar Association of Illinois and the Decalogue Society.
Lawyers representing the Chicago Council of Lawyers, the Puerto Rican Bar Association, the Hispanic Lawyers Association of Illinois, the Cook County Bar Association and the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago also attended.
Their ideas of how to boost the judiciary's image that could be addressed at the Convening run the gamut from promoting legal services to the poor to encouraging well-vetted changes in judicial elections.
Dawn Clark Netsch, a professor emerita at Northwestern University School of Law, encouraged the group to consider a number of areas for improvement.
Those include voter education, diversity on the bench, ballot changes, court funding, judicial selection, retention reforms, tone and conduct of campaigns and public confidence in the courts.
Others suggested determining whether there should be minimum qualifications for judicial candidates, better informing the public about how courts actually work and looking at the way bar groups evaluate judicial candidates.
But Netsch, a former state comptroller and legislator who has been vocal on many of those topics, emphasized that there would be ''no preconceived notions'' on what action to take before the convention.
William R. Quinlan, a partner in Quinlan & Carroll Ltd. who chairs the Cook County Judicial Advisory Council, said action needed to be taken because of the growing expense of judicial campaigns.
''Money does win,'' he told the group.
Specifically, Quinlan pointed out the fact that candidates in three Cook County subcircuit races took in more than $150,000 in their election efforts. All three of those candidates won.
Netsch and Canary also pointed to the record-setting cost for an open high court seat in southern Illinois. Justice Lloyd A. Karmeier prevailed in that race, in which he and his Democratic opponent combined to spend more than $9.5 million.
Karmeier didn't respond to any of the criticisms of the 5th District race, but none of his colleagues other than McMorrow spoke up, either.
All of the justices except Rita B. Garman attended the meeting.
While many of the participants pointed to recent developments as the impetus for the meeting, McMorrow pointed out that some of the problems were persistent.
The chief justice marveled at the difficulty of voter education, based on two experiences she had.
The first occurred before she joined the high court. McMorrow said she encountered a woman who said she admired the judge and had told all of her friends to vote for McMorrow in the upcoming election.
McMorrow wasn't on the ballot.
But when McMorrow did run for the high court, she thought the poll workers and even fellow voters would be excited about her showing up to cast a ballot, especially because she had appeared in TV commercials bolstering her campaign.
It wasn't to be: when McMorrow responded to the election judge's request for her name, the poll worker asked, ''How do you spell that?''