N.Y. Times: Last month, Wisconsin voters did something that is routine in the United States but virtually unknown in the rest of the world: They elected a judge.
The vote came after a bitter$5 million campaign in which a small-town trial judge with thincredentials ran a television advertisement falsely suggesting that theonly black justice on the state Supreme Court had helped free a blackrapist. The challenger unseated the justice with 51 percent of thevote, and will join the court in August.
The election was unusually hard-fought, with caustic advertisements on both sides, many from independent groups.
Contrast that distinctively American method of selecting judges withthe path to the bench of Jean-Marc Baissus, a judge on the Tribunal deGrand Instance, a district court, in Toulouse, France. He still recallsthe four-day written test he had to pass in 1984 to enter the 27-monthtraining program at the École Nationale de la Magistrature, the eliteacademy in Bordeaux that trains judges in France.