Judicial Excellence for Colorado Dinner Reservations Now on Sale!
Click here to reserve a seat at the 2016 Judicial Excellence for Colorado Dinner.
Is Justice for Sale in 39 of our Country’s States?
Join CJI for an Insider’s Account of Partisan Judicial Elections
Former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb served more than four years as Alabama’s first female chief justice. In 2011, she resigned in frustration at being unable to persuade the state legislature to change the way Alabama selects judges. Justice Cobb will speak about her experience at the 2016 Judicial Excellence for Colorado Dinner in October.
Last year, in a detailed piece in Politico Magazine about the dangers of electing judges, Cobb wrote that she was "ashamed" by the amount of money and favors exchanged in judicial races in Alabama and 38 other states. “In Alabama,” she wrote, “you don’t get to mete out justice without spending millions of dollars.”
Reserve your seat to hear Justice Cobb speak at the 2016 Judicial Excellence for Colorado Dinner.
CJI Supports Amendment 71 on this Fall's Ballot
Amendment 71 on this fall’s Colorado ballot seeks to protect the Colorado constitution by differentiating the process of amending the constitution from the process of creating a state law.
Currently the process to amend the constitution is the same as the process to write a state statute. This has led to the Colorado constitution being amended over 150 times since 1875. By comparison, the United States constitution, a hundred year’s older, has only been amended 27 times.
The fact that it is no harder to get an amendment on Colorado’s ballot than it is to get a statute on the ballot means that laws that are more appropriately classified as statutes have been added to the end of our ever growing constitution.
Amendment 71 would require signatures from all 35 state senate districts to place an amendment on the Colorado ballot, giving the rural parts of our state a say in amending the constitution. Once on the ballot, amendments would require a 55 percent super-majority rather than just half.
“Parents' Voices: The Other Side of the Bench” was released in July 2011. The report, conducted over a two year period, uses surveys and interviews of parents who were involved in dependency and neglect proceedings in Colorado courts. The report is available for download below.
