Republican Party of Minn. v. White, 536 U.S. 765, 52 (2002)

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816

REPUBLICAN PARTY OF MINN. v. WHITE

Ginsburg, J., dissenting

The justification for the pledges or promises prohibition follows from these principles. When a judicial candidate promises to rule a certain way on an issue that may later reach the courts, the potential for due process violations is grave and manifest. If successful in her bid for office, the judicial candidate will become a judge, and in that capacity she will be under pressure to resist the pleas of litigants who advance positions contrary to her pledges on the campaign trail. If the judge fails to honor her campaign promises, she will not only face abandonment by supporters of her professed views; she will also "ris[k] being assailed as a dissembler," 247 F. 3d, at 878, willing to say one thing to win an election and to do the opposite once in office.

A judge in this position therefore may be thought to have a "direct, personal, substantial, [and] pecuniary interest" in ruling against certain litigants, Tumey, 273 U. S., at 523, for she may be voted off the bench and thereby lose her salary and emoluments unless she honors the pledge that secured her election. See Shepard, Campaign Speech: Restraint and Liberty in Judicial Ethics, 9 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 1059, 1083- 1092 (1996); see id., at 1088 ("[A] campaign promise [may be characterized as] a bribe offered to voters, paid with rulings consistent with that promise, in return for continued employ-ess Clause cases do not focus solely on bias against a particular party, but rather inquire more broadly into whether the surrounding circumstances and incentives compromise the judge's ability faithfully to discharge her assigned duties. See supra, at 815. To be sure, due process violations may arise where a judge has been so personally "enmeshed in matters" concerning one party that he is biased against him. See Johnson v. Mississippi, 403 U. S. 212, 215 (1971) (per curiam) (judge had been "a defendant in one of petitioner's civil rights suits and a losing party at that"). They may also arise, however, not because of any predisposition toward a party, but rather because of the judge's personal interest in resolving an issue a certain way. See Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Lavoie, 475 U. S. 813 (1986). Due process will not countenance the latter situation, even though the self-interested judge "will apply the law to [the losing party] in the same way he [would apply] it to any other party" advancing the same position, ante, at 776.

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