Report
An analysis of state supreme court rulings shows that an influx of corporate campaign cash is influencing judges to rule against those injured while on the job or by business entities such as hospitals.
Using a front group, the NRA has spent millions of dollars to influence the elections of state supreme court judges and attorneys general nationwide.
Report
This compilation of recent reports describes the distorting influence of campaign cash and suggests policy solutions to mitigate these problems.
Issue Brief
Billy Corriher looks at the judges who won elections in 2012 while raising roughly $1 million or more, as well as those who had more than $1 million spent on their behalf by independent groups.
Issue Brief
Public financing programs can drastically limit the opportunity for lawyers, corporations, or others to influence the law through campaign contributions, and can make smaller donors more important to the process.
Issue Brief
Mandatory recusal rules would go a long way toward ensuring citizens that judges and by extension, justices, can be bought.
The explosion of campaign cash in judicial elections has led citizens to doubt whether judges can be impartial.
A CAP Action report explains why merit-selection systems and retention elections are a good way to keep judges free from politicization of elections.
Issue Brief
Reasonable minds can differ over whether to elect judges, but it is clear that electing judges in partisan elections leads to a myriad of problems.
Issue Brief
Disclosure laws for corporation and individual donations to judicial elections allow voters to know who's spending money on electing certain judges—and whose side those judges will be on in trial.
Americans are rightly concerned about significant sums of corporate campaign cash capturing their elected representatives. Even more troubling, though less reported, is the flood of campaign money that has poured into elections for state court justices over the last two decades. Judges are supposed to be independent, fair arbiters of justice. In the Citizens United [...]
Report
Report from Billy Corriher documents how corporations are bending judges to their will through campaign cash.
Billy Corriher is the Associate Director of Research for Legal Progress at American Progress, where his work focuses on state courts and the influence of political contributions on judges. Corriher joined American Progress after working in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, where he investigated civil rights and privacy [...]