My column of September 8 created a large buzz in a small universe.
Lawyers and politicos forwarded in a frenzy that day's offering on Courtney Goodson's announcement of her candidacy to rise next year from associate justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court to chief.
There is something about the matter that seems to interest lawyers and political insiders.
Goodson had said in a slick announcement video that the court should be run by the people, which would be an utter disaster for law and justice. And she said that she would lead the state's highest court by "conservative" values, which suggested that her justice is not blind, but keen to the political wind.
The column recounted Justice Goodson's politically rising marital history.
She first married lawyer Mark Henry of Fayetteville, of the politically connected Henry family that is so close to the Clintons that Bill and Hillary held their wedding reception at the home of Mark's parents, Morriss and Ann.
Herself a former resident of Harrison, Courtney was able to proclaim herself endorsed for her associate justice race in 2010 by both Clinton and her own old hometown family friend--Clinton's first Republican rival, the late John Paul Hammerschmidt.
Then, soon after winning in 2010, Courtney got remarried to John Goodson, a multimillionaire lawyer and political mover-shaker in Texarkana who got mentioned by Fortune magazine a few years ago for an alleged role in what the article described as a Miller County judicial "hell hole."
The article alleged a local practice to file class-action lawsuits against deep-pocketed outsiders. Often the outsiders would settle seemingly under duress because the plaintiffs kept stalling with what looked to some like the acquiescence of the local court.
The column concluded that the chief justice job most likely would indeed be turned over next year to the people--two people, Courtney and John, because they had enough money to scare opponents away.
There are two ways to get elected to a judgeship in Arkansas, neither having to do with merit.
The first is to announce early with plenty of money in hopes of running unopposed. The second is, if opposed, to have "judge" before your name on the ballot.
For some reason Arkansas voters figure a person called "Judge" is the best choice for a judgeship.
I once tutored a young elementary school student named Judge. I told him to study hard and he'd be a shoo-in for the Arkansas Supreme Court.
All of that is to say that a group of lawyers and politicos is at work trying to find an opponent for the Goodsons, one with judge before his or her name and pristinely regarded in the state bar.
And it is to say that the group is not having a great deal of success.
Potential candidates are cowed by the Goodsons' great wealth and willingness to tap it, not to mention their general connections.
A minor but fun example: Mike Beebe put John Goodson on the UA Board of Trustees. In a perhaps unrelated development, a door has now been opened between the trustees' small skybox and the Fayetteville chancellor's much-larger one at Razorback Stadium, permitting coordinated catering and freer rarefied mingling among invited elites.
I mention it only because some people are calling this the "Goodson Door," for reasons about which I could only speculate.
Another deterrent to an opposing candidacy is the Citizens United ruling and the rise of "dark money," meaning unrestricted sums raised from secret and unidentifiable sources.
Poor Tim Cullen had the temerity to run for the state Supreme Court in 2014. Some mystery group made an expensive buy of television time to accuse him of being a child molester, essentially, merely because he had been assigned by a federal appeals court to do what a lawyer must do--help a man get his fair day in court. Cullen had simply prepared a court-ordered brief for an appellant convicted of child-predatory activity.
Worthy prospective candidates for the state Supreme Court are frightful of the possibility of being slimed like that by well-heeled slanderers whose true motives are unknown and whom they can't identify or much less confront--all over something innocent but cynically exploitable in their histories that they can't possibly imagine.
Being the positive sort of person that I am, I see a potential bright side to the Goodsons' likely unopposed ascension to the highest judicial pinnacle of Arkansas.
Maybe political leaders would come to look more seriously at amending our state Constitution to stop electing appellate judges and have them selected by a merit process--a notion recently endorsed, I was happy to see, by the lawyer who currently is the governor of the state.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 10/01/2015