Comment by morkalork
16 days ago
Democracy is cool and all but perhaps roles like judges and prosecutors should be selected on competence, not by perceived tough-on-crime popular elections
16 days ago
Democracy is cool and all but perhaps roles like judges and prosecutors should be selected on competence, not by perceived tough-on-crime popular elections
Who does the selection? In the USA, doesn’t it always come down to voter choice one way or another? We typically elect a sheriff but a mayor appoints a police chief. The mayor is elected however. What process could be used to determine process and selection that would avoid voter input?
Open application process. Select whoever had the highest law school grades. Or alternatively make all the applicants take a competitive exam. Anonymous grading.
First you should find some correlation between law school grades and competence of the lawyer.
https://www.alanet.org/legal-management/2023/february/column...
> When looking at on-the-job performance, our internal data — based on thousands of reports from actual attorneys at some of the top law firms — tells us that GPA on average has a 2.2% predictive validity. Meaning that GPA, the thing that the LSAT is meant to predict, explains very little. When we look directly at the LSAT, we see an even smaller correlation of 0.9% on average.
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Who does the selection? Who approves the applications? Who ensures the process is open? It always comes down to winners of elections. The USA isn’t a technocracy or meritocracy, for better or worse.
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Appointment by mayor or local government is fine. Make it a normal public service job. There are reasonable questions about why the US needs quite so many fine-grained local police authorities and who polices the police, though.
Make them fight to the death? Seriously, it would solve sooo many problems.
The highest level public offices should always be either directly elected, or appointed by an elected person for only the duration of their office. This way voters can get rid of them if necessary. Otherwise they become an unelected deep state.
Other levels of public office should be strictly by competence. Meaning by trials open for all citizens.
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