YR: It has been claimed by some, including dissenters, that your opinion is going to cause havoc with elections for judges. It is said that many corporations will spend huge fortunes -- scores of millions of dollars -- electing judges who will be beholden to them and will vote in their favor and therefore against all plaintiffs in personal injury cases, environmental cases, employment discrimination cases, illegal firing cases and so on. What is your response to this?
SA: Not true.
AK: So long as the corporations and a Judgeship candidate do not get together in a room and agree in advance that the candidate will do this, it is okay. There will not be what I call a quid pro quo. The candidate will not have been asked to do it, and the corporation will not have demanded he do it, so it won't matter if the corporation has contributed ten million dollars for the candidate's election or 100 million dollars or whether the candidate wins only because of the corporation's dollars. It is just like with Congress. The judicial candidate or a Congressional candidate will remain free to vote as he or she pleases in a case or in Congress, and will not be affected by the fact that the corporation gave millions of dollars for his election. It's been this way in Congress for decades, and we are confident it will be this way with courts.
Anyway, the whole question will soon become superannuated. Because, as with Congress or the Presidency, corporations will be free to run for election as judges themselves. So you won't have to worry about the possible corrupting influence of contributions on human-person candidates. Nor will you have to worry, when a corporation wins election to a judgeship -- as they had to worry about candidates in the Gilded Age -- about whether a candidate, once he or she is bought, will stay bought, or will instead sell out to somebody else who gives him more. The corporation as judge or legislator will obviously vote for what it wants, so there will be none of this "will he stay bought?" concern.
And for the same reason, you won't have to worry about undue influence, as the dissenters pretend you will have to. When corporations contribute to the campaign of human persons, the candidate will not allow the corporations to unduly influence them. And when the corporations themselves run for and are elected to office, there will of course be no undue influence. How can anyone be accused of having undue influence over himself? The same is true for corporations.
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