This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, August 5th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

To deal with the very real issue of corruption in the judicial branch,

some would prefer to move in the direction of public funding for judicial elections.

Bob Levy, Chairman of the Cato Institute, says that among the available options to deal with

corruption among judges, public funding is perhaps the worst.

We spoke last week at Cato University in Annapolis, Maryland.

There is a very real potential problem of dollar contributions corrupting judges who are elected, and there's

a some attempts to get away from that problem, a very real problem, set up where we could go in the two ways of dealing with judicial elections.

Well, one way of dealing with it, of course, is not to have judicial elections, and that's what we've done at the federal

level. Federal judges are appointed by the president, subject to confirmation by the Senate, and

federal judges, as you know, have lifetime tenure. So some folks have argued that she maybe

this lifetime tenure is not a great idea. Maybe we ought to have a mandatory

retirement age or maybe we ought to have term limits for federal judges, but I think most folks agree

that this appointment process at the federal level does at least insulate federal judges

from the political factors that affect legislative and executive elections.

But it is, as you note, a different story at the state level.

Most of the state judges are elected.

And either they have what's called contested elections

where they face challengers at the end of each term,

or they're initially appointed,

but then they have what's called retention elections.

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