"President-Elect Courts Congress and Urges Tax Cut" (front page, Dec. 19) mentions George W. Bush's proposed repeal of the estate tax, which has been described as benefiting only the wealthy.
Even in the Lithuanian territories incorporated into the Russian Empire, some judicial sejmiks were allowed to elect lower court judges; it was the only elective representative institution to survive in the Lithuanian territories after the partition.
In the rest of the country, the 39 states that elect high-court judges need improved recusal requirements and robust public funding to keep judges from "dialling for dollars".
In Illinois, we elect state court judges.
Though the traditional leaders were not elected, the courts were deeply democratic, Mr. Mandela argued.
In the absence of any control by elected deputies, courts or the media, the system lapsed into the illusion that everything is permitted, and began to make mistake after mistake, not even realizing that it was destroying itself.
Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union construction national secretary, Dave Noonan, told Guardian Australia "the thing that Senator Cash can't comprehend is that workers choose their elected officials, courts and politicians don't and shouldn't".
Formerly, each was headed by an elected levy court that set the tax rate and appropriated funds.
In America class actions are often certified by elected lower-court judges (who pander to popular will); in Britain "group actions" need the go-ahead from an unelected High Court judge.
Nobody has more access to knowledge of the practices than anybody else, and with an elected "supreme court" and editable core policies, Wikipedia shows how speech regulation can be conducted in a completely transparent and relatively participatory way.
The anti-corruption commission is pressing charges against 308 former MPs and senators, most of them from the Pheu Thai party, for voting to make the upper house fully elected (a court had ruled in November that such a change would be unconstitutional).
