“The New Politics of Judicial Elections in the Great Lakes States, 2000-2008” was a regional report from the Justice at Stake Campaign, edited by Jesse Rutledge and published in 2008. Justice at Stake posted the report as a PDF at gavelgrab.org/wp-content/resources/NPJEGreatLakes2000-2008.FINAL.pdf, an address that no longer serves the file.
The title tied the report to the New Politics of Judicial Elections series, the national studies of money in state supreme court campaigns that Justice at Stake produced with two partners, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Rutledge also edited the series’ 2006 national edition.
In 2009, Judge Kevin Burke of the Hennepin County District Court in Minnesota and Judge Steve Leben of the Kansas Court of Appeals cited pages 3 to 10 of the report in the Widener Law Journal as an overview of the judicial election spending that Justice at Stake tracked with help from member organizations. The judges cited the report for the point that special interest groups in some states had spent large sums to achieve a “favorable” judiciary.
The series’ national report for 2000 to 2009, published in August 2010, ranked five states that border the Great Lakes among the 10 with the highest total spending on high court elections that decade: Ohio second at $29.8 million, Pennsylvania third at $22.7 million, Illinois fifth at $20.7 million, Michigan sixth at $18.6 million and Wisconsin eighth at $11.5 million.