Best Practices for Judicial Evaluations
Recently, the State Journal-Reporter published an article which briefly examined the Illinois State Bar Association’s voter recommendations for judicial retention in the 7th Judicial Circuit, where the State Journal-Reporter publishes. The brief article raises interesting issues about judicial evaluation. At Appleseed, we believe judicial evaluation is valuable and necessary oversight for the judiciary, but requires credibility in the process to produce reliable results.
In the 7th Judicial Circuit, the ISBA found one retention candidate “not recommended” for retention, and the article quotes criticisms of the 
ISBA’s process made by that candidate, Judge Graves. According to the article, surveys were mailed to 720 of the 1400 attorneys in the 7th Judicial Circuit and 232 responses were returned. Judge Graves criticized the process for a “low sample size” and “low response rate” and also suggested that responses were based more upon the popularity of her new court rules than upon objective measures of her performance. However, the ISBA surveys areas of judicial performance such as legal ability, integrity, impartiality and judicial temperament, which are unrelated to administrative abilities and negative responses were consistent across all eight categories surveyed.
Both the ABA Model Guidelines for Judicial Performance Evaluation (.pdf download) note and the American Judicature Society and State Justice Institute “Four States Report” (.pdf download) on judicial evaluations programs recommend ways to ensure sufficient response rates to get accurate assessments of judicial performance. The response rate described above is a respectable response rate under the best practices suggested by the model guidelines and the Four States Report. Likewise, the categories examined in the ISBA survey are performance-based measures, as recommended by the ABA, AJS and SJI.
The Judicial Performance Commission of Cook County, a project of Chicago Appleseed, evaluates judges in Cook County only and is designed with the best practices for judicial evaluations in mind. In addition to surveying attorneys identified in appearance data, the JPC survey focus on performance-based and behavior-based questions. Like the guidelines and reports suggest, Chicago Appleseed has social science researchers and statisticians examine our data to test its validity and to help the JPC weigh the responses appropriately, in the context of sample sizes.
Finally, the JPC issues evaluations (.pdf download) that seek collaborative solutions with the judiciary to improve the quality of sitting judges. As recommended by the Four States Report, the JPC offers performance improvement plans that “provide very specific feedback to the judges about their strengths and weaknesses.” (see page 119 of the Four States Report) Our evaluations provide a narrative description of the judge’s performance, which is shared with the individual judges, their supervising/presiding judges and the Chief Judge. They are made available to any bar association seeking to issue voter recommendations as well as to the public at large, for making their own decisions about retention candidates.
Chicago Appleseed, and our affiliate Chicago Council of Lawyers, are not involved with judicial evaluations in the 7th Judicial Circuit in Illinois; we evaluate judges only in the Cook County Judicial Circuit. (There are 23 judicial circuits in Illinois) Chicago Appleseed also hosts voteforjudges.org which publicizes the voter recommendations of the Alliance of Bar Associations for Judicial Screening concerning Cook County. The ISBA is a member of the Alliance of Bar Associations.