majority vote" under procedures provided by the General Assembly. Presently, candidates for judgeships initially run with party designation at the time of the primary elections. If a majority is not achieved, a primary runoff is held. At the time of the subsequent general election, there are usually at most two candidates and one candidate will be elected with a majority vote. With non-partisan elections, the most likely procedure will be for candidates to run for the first time at the time of the general election. If more than two candidates are on the ballot and there is no majority for one candidate in this voting, there would presumably have to be a special runoff election a few weeks later. This would mean that many judges ultimately would be elected at these special runoff elections following general elections which would probably have very small voter participation. An alternative might be to ask the political parties to include all candidates for judgeships without party designations on their ballots at the time of the primary elections paid for by the political parties. As to other changes in the appellate courts, the proposed constitution would change the number of judges on the Court of Appeals from six to seven and would have the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals both selected by the members of their respective courts for four year terms with eligibility to succeed oneself. The Court of Appeals judges would remain chosen by districts. The 1980 summer session retained the present system of selecting Supreme Court justices on a statewide basis, changing the controversial proposal in the 1979 preliminary draft calling for the election of Supreme Court justices from districts.
RETENTION OF JUDGES Once judges are selected by whatever method, it is important to provide procedures to try to retain good judges and remove those judges whose performance bring their offices into disrepute. This the convention did by setting up two commissions. Article IV, section 17 sets up an Arkansas Compensation Commission to make recommendations to the General Assembly concerning salaries of all executive, legislative, and judicial state officers. The members of the commission are appointed by the Governor. In article V, section 24, the proposed constitution sets up a Commission on Judicial and Prosecutorial Discipline and Disability to hear complaints concerning judges and prosecuting attorneys and submit recommendations to the Arkansas Supreme Court for disciplinary action including removal from office. Under the 1874 Constitution, it is not practically possible to remove a judge from office until the next election, since the only present remedy, impeachment, is cumbersome and never used. One feature of this discipline commission in the initial 1979 draft that provoked some discussion was that all members were appointed solely by the Governor. The 1980 summer session changed this to a commission of nine persons, three chosen by representatives of each of the three branches of state government. REORGANIZATION OF COURTS Under the present constitution and its amendments, the general trial level courts are the circuit courts, chancery courts, and probate courts. The judges of the chancery court are also judges of the probate court within that jUdge's chancery district. In addition, there are a large number of special courts of li-
Dean Robert Walsh was born and raised in Nebraska. He attended Providence College in Rhode Island and Harvard Law School. While in law school, he served as an editor of the Harvard Journal on Legislation. After law school, he practiced with the law firm of McCutchen, Black, Verleger and Shea in Los Angeles, primarily as a litigator. He then was a law professor at Villanova Law School in Pennsylvania before coming to Little Rock as Dean of the UALR School of Law in June of 1976. In addition to his responsibilities as Dean, he is a professor of law, currently teaching a course in Federal Courts. Dean Walsh is extremely active in Bar Association work. He is currently a member of the Bar Association's Constitutional Reform Committee. For the past two years, he has been a member of the Judicial Article Task Force of the Arkansas judicial Planning Committee appointed by the Arkansas Supreme Court.
mited jurisdiction: county courts, justice of the peace courts, mayors' courts, police courts, courts of common pleas, and municipal courts. Some of these special courts, especially the county courts and justice of the peace courts, do not necessarily have lawyers as judges. The county judge, who is really the chief executive officer of the county government, is given jurisdiction over such matters as juvenile proceedings. Justices of the peace have jurisdiction over small civil matters. Almost everyone in the justice system agrees that the present trial court structure needs to be simplified and that judicial officers should be trained in the law. The convention was, however, presented with many divergent views as to how court reorganization should be addressed in a new constitution. The proposed constitution simplifies the court structure by creating only two trial level courts: circuit courts and county trial courts. The county trial court takes the place of all the previous sundry courts of limited jurisdiction, the most important of which are the municipal courts. It is the intent of the convention that there be at least one county trial court in each county (schedule II section 2) and that the General Assembly in a number of counties may establish localized divisions as needed e.g. the Benton County Trial Court, Siloam Springs Division. In setting up the Circuit Court as the trial court of general jurisdiction, section 9 of article V states that the "Circuit Court shall sit in divisions of law, chancery, and family matters. Equity and probate matters shall be vested in the chancery division... The General Assembly may combine divisions or continued on page 209