Court Opinion

ID: 9541278
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 16:24:03.241698+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:02:42.116933
License: Public Domain

OAKS, Justice
(concurring and dissenting):
I concur that Senate confirmation of juvenile court judges is constitutional, and dissent from the judgment that Senate confirmation of supreme court, district court, and circuit court judges is unconstitutional.
The new process of judicial selection specified in H.B. 62, which deletes one type of legislative participation, is less subject to objection as legislative exercise of an executive power or as legislative control over the judicial branch than the law upset in Matheson v. Ferry, Utah, 641 P.2d 674 (1982). Consequently, the new process is constitutional, a fortiori, for the reasons expressed in my dissent in that case. Id. at 694-703.
Instead of listing my agreements and disagreements with the various points made in each of the opinions of the other members of the Court, I limit myself to a brief summary of my own position. I believe that the other members of the Court have taken an excessively narrow view of the legislative power, and have misread the role of Article VII, § 10 of the Constitution. Specifically, (1) the legislature’s power to participate in the selection of judges in the manner prescribed in this legislation is validly rooted in Article VIII, § 3 of the Constitution, which provides that judges “shall be selected for such terms and in such manner as shall be provided by law,” and (2) the power of judicial selection is neither attributable to nor limited by Article VII, § 10, which is inapplicable by its own terms because the method of selection of judges is “otherwise provided for” by Article VIII, § 3 and valid legislation enacted pursuant thereto.
*251As I contemplate the troubled history of this controversy, including the number and depth of the differences among members of this Court and the short life of some of the reasoning and part of the result in Mathe-son I, I can only hope that the persuasive life of some of the reasoning propounded in this latest round of opinions will be equally short-lived, and that this case, like Mathe-son I, will be remembered principally for its result.