Word: benching
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...jurist bangs his gavel, onlookers in the nation's most famous courtroom attentively come to order. Not the U.S. Supreme Court, silly -- The People's Court, with 11 million viewers daily, featuring Judge Joseph Wapner and his 30-minute brand of homespun jurisprudence. Now in A View from the Bench (Simon & Schuster; $17.95), the judge describes the evolution of his electronic philosophy...
...were not approaching strangers. Since 1980 Houston Attorney Joseph Jamail and his firm, Pennzoil's victorious counsel, doled out $248,000 in campaign contributions to the justices. As for Russell McMains, Texaco's chief appellate lawyer in Texas, he has donated some $40,000 to members of the high bench, and his former Corpus Christi firm gave $150,000 more. Such cozy bench-polishing tactics are not illegal, since Texas is one of only nine states where virtually all judges are chosen in partisan elections. It also has no limits on campaign gifts. "The appearance," says State Senator Frank Tejeda...
...alone. Now that case, along with the quickening torrent of lawyer donations to judges at all levels, is sparking what could be the first serious reform effort since the system settled into place in 1873. This week Chief Justice John Hill will take the extraordinary step of quitting the bench to lead a drive to abolish the elective process...
Hill, 64, a former state attorney general who will go into private practice, spent more than $1 million to get elected to the bench in 1984. But he came to believe that the "acceleration of campaign financing has become outrageous." He favors a merit-selection system, used in a number of states, under which the Governor selects judges from names submitted by a commission; the jurists are later voted up or down by the citizenry. Republican Governor William Clements is also pushing an appointive system, though only for the nine-member high court. "Texans have lost faith in their judicial...
...feeble-looking man and his daughter sat quietly on a bench outside the airport immigration office in Bahrain. Despite their apparent calm, they were the center of an international storm. Two days earlier they had disembarked in Abu Dhabi from Korean Air Lines Flight 858, en route from Baghdad to Seoul. Hours later the plane disappeared over the Andaman Sea, shortly before a scheduled stopover in Thailand. Officials in Seoul openly speculated that the Boeing 707, carrying 95 passengers and a crew of 20, might have been destroyed by a bomb planted by North Korean agents. South Korean President Chun...