Democracy and the Courts: The Rise of Judicial Elections in the Antebellum South

The first comprehensive examination of the development of judicial elections in the American South

The practice of choosing state judges by popular election is a unique aspect of American democracy. First appearing in Mississippi in 1832 and then sweeping across the United States, judicial elections had a distinctly Southern origin. Prior scholarship seeking to explain the broad acceptance of the elected judiciary mainly relied on the records of Northern-state constitutional conventions. In Democracy and the Courts, David M. Gold offers the first comprehensive exploration of the advent of this often-controversial democratic reform in the nineteenth-century American South.

Making intensive use of primary sources, such as constitutional-convention proceedings, legislative journals, and newspapers, Gold explores the various paths taken by Southern states toward the elective judiciary and the reasons why some states accepted judicial elections only partially or rejected them altogether. He considers the effect of judicial elections on judicial review before the Civil War and looks to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, assessing the final and ironic triumph of the elective judiciary during the decidedly undemocratic Jim Crow era.

David M. Gold is an attorney who retired from the Ohio Legislative Service Commission in 2016. He is the author of numerous books on legal and political history, including Democracy in Session and The Jacksonian Conservatism of Rufus P. Ranney.