News & Updates

As IAALS celebrates its tenth year, the Denver Business Journal sat down with Executive Director Rebecca Love Kourlis to recap her motivation for leaving the Colorado Supreme Court and founding IAALS, and the impacts made over the last decade.

For the last ten years, IAALS—the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System—has worked to rebuild the civil justice system. After much work, and through collaboration with some of the very best minds in the country, we are finally reaching a critical goalpost in that mission.

Why do you obey the law? Because you are afraid of the consequences if you don't? Or perhaps because it is the right thing to do? How about, because you believe that "government has the right to dictate to [you] proper behavior"? The third option—believing that government's laws and legal process have legitimacy—may be the keystone to building the most effective legal system.

According to a new poll, nearly nine in ten voters believe that judicial campaign support—whether in the form of direct contributions or independent spending—influences judicial decisions. This figure is a sharp increase from similar polls conducted over the last decade. These heightened concerns could be a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United or to a marked rise in judicial election spending, particularly by outside groups, in recent years.

On August 12, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor delivered the keynote address at the 2013 Legislative Summit of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Atlanta, Georgia. Justice O'Connor expressed concern that processes for selecting judges are becoming increasingly politicized, and that civics education is essential in helping young people understand that judges are obligated to make decisions based on the law, even if those decisions are politically unpopular.

In Minnesota, a broad-based group known as the Coalition for Impartial Justice, which includes more than 30 business, labor, religious, citizen, and legal groups, is working to implement the 2007 recommendations of the Quie Commission. The commission was unanimous in calling for the adoption of a "merit selection" process for judges and a performance evaluation program, with a majority of the commission favoring retention elections for subsequent terms.

Following an 18-month study, a Wisconsin state bar task force proposed that supreme court justices serve a single 16-year term. Justices currently serve 10-year terms and may stand for reelection. Though term limits would not stem the tide of candidate and special interest spending in the state's judicial elections, supporters believe term limits could help restore the public's trust in a court that has been plagued in recent years by alleged ethics violations and interpersonal conflicts.

In an interview with Parade Magazine, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Honorary Chair of the Advisory Committee to the Quality Judges Initiative, discusses why approval ratings for the U.S. Supreme Court justices have fallen, stressing that the public's broken confidence in the courts is due to misconceptions that the Court should base their decisions on political and personal beliefs rather than on the law.

A new site devoted to procedural fairness in the courts was recently launched by Judge Kevin Burke, District Judge in the Hennepin County (Minn.) District Court; Judge Steve Leben, Judge, Kansas Court of Appeals; the National Center for State Courts (with researcher David Rottman as its lead blogging participant); and Professor Tom Tyler, of Yale Law School.

The authors suggest that, though the Supreme Court of the United States has in recent years struck down campaign finance laws, it may be willing to tolerate limits on spending in judicial elections. Click here to read the article.

In the wake of allegations that a Pennsylvania state senator improperly helped her sister get elected to the state's high court, the Inquirer calls for merit-based appointment of appellate judges.