Election by the People, Election by the Legislature, Nomination by the Executive

The last topic told you the three methods exist and what can go wrong with each. This one asks the harder question: if you were designing a judiciary from scratch, which would you actually pick, and what would you gain, not just lose, by picking it?

In two minutes

Each method of appointing judges has a genuine merit as well as a risk — popular election gives democratic legitimacy, legislative election gives representative balance, and executive nomination gives professional, merit-based selection — and the choice between them is really a choice about which value matters most.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – I: Political Theory and Political Organisation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.