Bench, the Bar, and Everyone Else: Some Questions about State Judicial Selection, The

I am honored to be a part of this conference. I very much appreciate the hospitality of the law school, particularly the efforts of the Missouri Law Review staff. It has been a wonderful event. A wide range of views has been presented here, and I think that is a great credit to the people who organized the program. Just briefly, I am from Alabama, and I am not here to tell you what you should do in Missouri. That probably comes as a big relief. I became interested in this subject about fifteen years ago because of what was happening in my home state. It is a long story. One short version of it is that the award of punitive damages, in tort and even some contract litigation, had come off the rails to the point that Alabama was routinely castigated in Time magazine and elsewhere as "tort hell." The voters noticed this and voted for a radical change in the composition of the Supreme Court of Alabama. I viewed this as a positive development.