The United States has many systems of judicial selection, discipline and removal. The national courts (sometimes called the federal courts) and the fifty states differ quite substantially along these dimensions. This chapter describes the federal court system in some detail and provides a broad-brush overview of state judicial systems. There are perhaps two modest common characteristics among all these systems: (1) judicial selection in all the systems is, with minor exceptions, tightly connected to ordinary politics and judges individually or through their hierarchies play a relatively small role in judicial selection and removal; and (2) judges are initially appointed from the practicing bar at almost every level, with no strong expectation of promotion within the judicial hierarchy.

The national court system in the United States has four tiers. Initial decisions in many administrative matters, including immigration cases and disputed claims for payments to the disabled, are made by “administrative law judges.” These judges are appointed through merit-based processes within the administrative agency or bureaucracy they serve, although political appointees sometimes intervened in those processes in the Bush administration, and they are subject to discipline and removal through typical civil service mechanisms. Within the federal courts the lowest tier is occupied by “magistrate judges,” appointed within each district by the local judges and serving eight-year renewable terms. Magistrate judges make preliminary rulings in cases assigned to them by trial judges, make recommendations to those judges on dispositive questions and may try criminal cases, mostly minor offenses, with the defendant’s permission.