The Arkansas Bar Association will recommend Friday whether the state should toughen ethics rules for judges, curtail the influence of "dark money" in judicial campaigns, and appoint -- rather than elect -- the seven justices who sit on the state's highest court.
The bar's recommendations would go to legislators to enact new campaign-finance laws and to the Arkansas Supreme Court to adopt new ethics rules and court procedures.
Legislators would decide whether to put the judicial appointment matter on the ballot for voters.
Dramatic changes like these to Arkansas' judicial system "are a significant undertaking," bar association president Eddie Walker Jr. of Fort Smith said Wednesday.
Appointing rather than electing Supreme Court justices would be a "monumental" change for Arkansas, said retired Justice Robert Brown of Little Rock, who will speak to a panel on the topic Friday afternoon.
Proposed changes to judicial ethics rules and campaign-contribution laws also "are very big," Brown said.
Brown favors "immediate transparency with campaign donations," and doing away "with the fiction that judges don't know who their donors are, as well as a neutral review of judges' decisions not to recuse," he said.
"I think all that is very desirable," said Brown, a longtime supporter of electing judges rather than appointing them.
Arkansas Supreme Court Chief Justice-elect Dan Kemp of Mountain View, who takes office in January, proposed several changes to the task force. One was setting aside the existing rule that asks judges to stay ignorant of their campaign contributions.
"Seems like judges get a lot of flak from that," Kemp said Wednesday. He also backed new rules for judges to learn about their contributors and to allow lawyers to appeal to a higher court if a judge refuses a motion to recuse for a conflict of interest.
The bar association is holding its annual meeting this week in Hot Springs. Its House of Delegates governing body, with about 90 members, is expected to vote on a task force's recommendations Friday afternoon.
The governing group asked for study into the issues after several high-profile events involving recent Arkansas Supreme Court elections.
Among them: negative advertising purchased by out-of-state groups that poured into three state Supreme Court races in the past two years. All three candidates who were attacked -- Little Rock lawyers Tim Cullen in 2014 and Clark Mason in 2016, and Supreme Court Justice Courtney Goodson in 2016 -- lost their election bids.
National nonprofits that paid for $1 million-plus in advertising in the three campaigns, including the Law Enforcement Alliance of America and the Judicial Crisis Network, don't have to disclose who their donors are.
That makes it difficult for lawyers and clients to know whether a judge in any case might have a conflict of interest based on campaign financing, legal experts say.
An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette series in January reported that six firms of lawyers, most from out of state but who all work together on class-action cases, were among the biggest group contributors to current Arkansas Supreme Court justices. Among the lawyers was John Goodson of Texarkana, husband of Justice Goodson.
Campaign-finance records show six justices on the court had accepted an estimated $296,000 in total contributions from the law firms, most of it since 2009.
Since mid-2008, the newspaper reported, state Supreme Court opinions also have favored clients represented by John Goodson and his co-counsels in at least eight proceedings, which translated into millions in legal fees. The state's online court records system didn't find any Supreme Court cases in that time that Goodson clients lost.
In interviews, the justices said they followed ethics rules because they made the court decision without knowing who their contributors were.
Among other ethics and campaign-finance revisions to be considered by the bar association Friday:
• Appointing Supreme Court justices through a merit system. A nominating commission would propose three names to the governor for an open seat. The governor would select the new justice.
• Limiting judges' gift-givers to relatives. Gifts from friends, lawyers and other people that are now allowed would be banned.
• Prohibiting judicial candidates from soliciting help from outside groups independent from the campaign, such as nonprofits that buy attack ads.
• Prohibiting judges from unnecessary delay in deciding any court issue.
• Requiring out-of-state groups that buy campaign ads to register and report the source of their funds. Rep. Clarke Tucker, D-Little Rock, proposed such a law in 2015, but it failed in committee.
• Supporting online filing of campaign-finance reports to make them more easily searchable for the public, and require more contributions to be reported before election day.
Many of the proposed changes "are new. We haven't had them before" in Arkansas, said Little Rock lawyer Scott Trotter, who appeared before the bar association task force that drafted the changes.
If adopted, "they will really, I think, improve our entire system," Trotter said.
Metro on 06/16/2016