Tennessee Plan

Until the ratification of the constitutional amendment in 2014, when a vacancy occurred, the Judicial Nominating Commission accepted applications from any qualified Tennessee lawyer. Typical qualifications include age, residency, and proper professional standing. The commission then chose three nominees from the applications received. The commission submitted these three nominees—altogether called a panel—to the governor of Tennessee. Residency qualifications included not only state citizenship, but also citizenship within a particular Grand Division.

If the governor rejected the entire panel, the commission had to submit another panel. When this occurred, the governor was compelled to choose a nominee from the second panel. No one who was on a rejected panel of nominees can be on the second panel. This process effectively guaranteed that one of six of the nominees chosen by the 17 members of the Nominating Commission must become a judge.

The Judicial Nominating Commission was composed of 17 unelected members, with explicit requirements that the majority be lawyers.[1]

Once chosen by the governor, the judge took his/her seat. At the first statewide general election following his or her appointment the person's name is placed before the public on the ballot on a simple yes-no basis, e.g., "Shall Jon R. Smith be elected and retained as Judge, Court of Criminal Appeals, for Middle Tennessee?" If a majority of voters decides this question in the negative, the process outlined above starts over.

Every eight years (1998, 2006, 2014, 2022, et seq.), all members of all of the state appellate courts are subjected to this process as well. All judges are elected statewide, not just in the Grand Division from which they are appointed.

In 2006, all judges submitted for approval received an affirmative vote of at least 70 percent.[4]

Until its dissolution in 2014, the 12-member Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission reviewed the record of incumbent judges and published its findings approximately six weeks before the retention elections.[5] This report gave the panel's rationale for its recommendations based on the public record of each of the judges and a public interview process in which potential areas for improvement were noted. The report summarized these findings and noted the vote by which judge was recommended (or, theoretically, not recommended) for retention, although not how each individual commissioner voted.

This report was published in the state's major metropolitan newspapers; the 2006 report appeared in Sunday papers as a special section. The 2006 report endorsed all of the incumbent judges seeking reelection, most unanimously and none by a margin of less than 8-3; one member appointed to the review panel at this time was unable to serve.[6]

The General Assembly adopted the Modified Missouri Plan in 1971 to apply to judges of the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, and Court of Criminal Appeals.

Two years later, the Democratic majority in the Legislature was alarmed that Republican Governor Winfield Dunn was going to be able to appoint all five Supreme Court justices when their eight-year terms expired in 1974, meaning that they would subsequently face the voters as incumbents . The Legislature passed a bill to exempt the Supreme Court from the Modified Missouri Plan and return it to popular election, but it was vetoed by Governor Dunn.[7]

At the same time, Republicans in upper East Tennessee were pressing hard to create a new medical school at East Tennessee State University (ETSU). Dunn, who was from Memphis, opposed the creation of a second state medical school that would compete for resources with the University of Tennessee Health Science Center (UT Health and Sciences Center), which was in Dunn's hometown. Dunn vetoed the bill creating the medical school.[8]

House Speaker Ned McWherter, D-Dresden, and Rep. Palma Robinson, R-Jonesborough, agreed to swap votes with McWherter providing some Democratic votes to override the medical school veto and Robinson providing some Republican votes to override the Supreme Court bill veto. The deal went down just as planned, creating what is now known as the James Quillen School of Medicine at ETSU, and removed the Supreme Court from the Modified Missouri Plan.

In 1978, a judiciary amendment proposed by a limited constitutional convention which had met the previous fall, was defeated in a statewide special election at which only a series of proposed constitutional amendments were considered. It would have, among other provisions, largely formalized the adoption of the Modified Missouri Plan. The other amendments under consideration at the time were primarily of a technical nature, serving mostly to remove obsolete language, such as clauses forbidding interracial marriage and requiring public school segregation, which had long been rendered totally invalid by prior federal judicial decisions, and all were approved by large majorities. Only the judiciary amendment would have made a major, substantive change, and it was rejected by a large majority, which failed to provide any closure on the issue.

From 1974 until 1994, justices of the Supreme Court stood for partisan election, but they were nominated by the executive committees of their respective parties rather than in primary elections as was the case for other state officials standing for election. Reflecting the partisan balance of the state at the time, Democrats won every election for the Supreme Court in this time frame, often without Republican opposition.

The Modified Missouri Plan continued to apply to the two intermediate appellate courts. During the 20 years of the Modified Missouri Plan, no judges were removed from office by the voters.

In 1994, the Legislature overhauled the process to include the Supreme Court again, provide more evaluation of incumbent justices, and provide more information to voters in advance of retention elections. The Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission was created to review and rate the performance of individual judges and publish that information.[5] This became known as the Tennessee Plan.

Under the Tennessee Plan, one judge (State Supreme Court Justice Penny White) was removed in 1996. She was highly rated by the Evaluation Commission, but her opinion in a death penalty case became controversial and this was played up by those opposing her reconfirmation.

As of January, 2015, opponents of the Tennessee Plan were still fighting it in the courts. Their complaint centers around the wording of the ballot question in the 2014 referendum, and the fact that the other constitutional amendments on the ballot which involved changing constitutional language were worded in a way which showed both the language proposed for replacement and the proposed replacement language while the judicial amendment showed only the proposed new language without showing the language calling for the election of the judges of the Supreme Court and intermediate appeallate courts which was being proposed for deletion.

• James W. Ely and Theodore Brown (2002), A history of the Tennessee Supreme Court, University of Tennessee Press, ISBN 1-57233-178-X, ISBN 978-1-57233-178-5