Title should be adjusted to “Some South Carolina Judges..”
Elected judges are entirely the opposite.
It sounds like the entire judicial branch of the United States has become politicized. That’s really unfortunate. It’s not the case in other countries.
Take a look at the backgrounds of the judges who are appointed and tell me it’s not partisan in Canada.
Usually the liberals appoint judges with close Liberal Party ties and the same with the conservatives.
Degrees might be a reasonable proxy for general intelligence which is nice to have in a judge, but so is popular support. We already let any fool off the street write the law, they should also be qualified to interpret the law.
The problem with this is that our system is built on literally centuries of case law, in addition to all the legislation. Fools off the street don't know any of that stuff. Are we going to wait around while they spend weeks doing the research for every case?
We already let any fool off the street write the law
Foolish legislators often have their laws struck down for being unconstitutional. If we're going to let fools also be judges, then the inmates are running the asylum and we might as well not have a constitution at all.
Most places outside of NYC prefer to have elected judges “town/village justices” for revenue purposes. Basically, they plea down as many state violations as possible to local ordinances, as more of the fines go to the towns instead of the state.