Judicial Retention Revisited

As this podcast gets posted, in the summer of 2014, the voters of the State of Tennessee are about to go to the polls to decide whether to retain three of the Justices of their Supreme Court.

While judicial retention elections are traditionally sleepy affairs, this one is different: the Lieutenant Governor and others are making a concerted effort to convince the voters to "non-retain" these three Justices. Why? We wanted to ask the Lt. Governor, but, to our disappointment, he did not return our calls and emails.

So we've reached back twenty years, to the last (and only) time that a Justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court -- Stewart's colleague at the University of Tennessee, Penny White -- was non-retained. And we've found some eerie similarities to the current controversy.