When Judges Become Politicians

Like anybody a position of power, judges are prone to bias and
corruption. In a new article in Forbes, Alexander Tabarrok quantifies how
much worse the damages are if the judge is an elected official.

In research published in the Journal of Law and Economics, Eric Helland, associate professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College, and I analyzed thousands of tort awards throughout the U.S. We found that awards against out-of-state defendants were 42% higher in states that use partisan elections to select their judges than in states that appoint judges; a $363,000 per-case increase on average.
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Such awards help judges get re-elected. In a remarkably frank admission, Richard Neely, a West Virginia Supreme Court judge (now retired), explained the incentives that govern elected judges: "As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to injured in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else's money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me."

No surprise here – people respond to incentives. Giving a jury greater
discretion to determine rewards will, at a minimum, give more power to
a group of people who are not directly incentivized to lean one way or
another. This serves as another reminder that bureaucrats in costume
shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt anymore than the next guy.