Tennessee’s system for choosing appellate judges faced an uncertain future as the Judicial Nominating Commission approached a scheduled end. The commission was scheduled to terminate on June 30, 2012, and to do no further business after a final sunset on June 30, 2013.
The commission’s 17 members reviewed applications from lawyers seeking appointment and sent the governor three nominees for each vacancy on the Tennessee Supreme Court and the state’s two other appellate courts. If the governor rejected an entire panel, the commission had to submit another. The judge the governor chose then faced yes-or-no retention elections every eight years. One judge, Supreme Court Justice Penny White, was removed under the plan in 1996.
The legislature adopted the plan by statute in 1971, creating the Appellate Court Nominating Commission, which later became the Judicial Nominating Commission. The plan was repealed for justices of the supreme court in 1974 and brought back for Supreme Court selection in 1994, along with a judicial performance evaluation program. From 1974 until 1994, Supreme Court justices stood for partisan election, with nominees chosen by the parties’ executive committees. The Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission was created to review and rate the performance of individual judges and publish the results. The system had been known as the “Tennessee Plan” since 1994.
Tennessee’s system was a modified version of the Missouri Plan, the merit-selection method that originated in Missouri in 1940.
Without the commission, which screened candidates under the plan, Tennessee would have no formal process of selection for filling appellate vacancies.
Peter Hardin reported this story for Gavel Grab on May 24, 2012, when the site was a project of Justice at Stake. His original post is preserved by the Internet Archive. This account of the same events was written from the public record.
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