Today the American Tort Reform Foundation announced its annual list of “judicial hellholes,” an ignominious list of places where judges “systematically apply laws and court procedures in an unfair and unbalanced manner” in civil cases. You can read the full report here.

Interestingly, the state of Missouri appears at #4 (the Missouri Supreme Court itself ranked #6 last year). As the report points out, the state’s judicial nominating process has been “hijacked by the plaintiffs’ bar.” The hijacking has resulted in a state Supreme Court that allows admission of junk science as “expert” evidence while repeatedly striking down the Missouri legislature’s efforts at tort reform.

When the highest court in a state is effectively protecting plaintiff’s lawyers from the rule of law, it’s high time that advocates of judicial nominating commissions remembered the other name for that form of judicial selection: the “Missouri Plan.”