The Politicization of the Bench
A critique of the growing trend to select judges based on their partisan alignment rather than their legal expertise.
One of the worst phases of party politics of the present day, the one to be most reprobated and dreaded for ulterior effects, is the tendency to select candidates for high judicial stations with distinct and direct reference to their known expressed partisan views touching questions upon which they may have to sit as judges, under oath, to decide according to law and precedent. This, however, is the legitimate fruit of the doctrine of the 'higher law' lately come into vogue; the only practical way, indeed, to give it vitality and power. To this fact the founders, prominent disciples and chief expounders of the 'higher law' dogma, have evidently not been blind or indifferent.
“The tendency to select candidates for high judicial stations with distinct and direct reference to their known expressed partisan views.”
This 1859 editorial reflects a perennial American anxiety: the erosion of judicial independence in favor of partisan litmus tests. The 'higher law' debate of the 1850s, often tied to the abolitionist movement and the Fugitive Slave Act, highlights how civic crises have always pressured the courts to abandon neutrality for ideological outcomes.
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