Harold See
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Harold Frend See, Jr. has served on the Alabama Supreme Court since 1997. He is retiring in 2008.
Alabama is one of eight states that picks state supreme court justices in partisan elections; See served in office as a Republican.
Background
See received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Emporia State University, Kansas, his Master of Science degree in economics from Iowa State University, and his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Iowa College of Law, where he graduated with honors and was awarded the Order of the Coif.
Justice See worked his way through school as a heavy equipment operator, a sheet metal worker, and a roofer.
He served as Assistant Professor of Economics at Illinois State University and practiced law with the nationally recognized law firm of Sidley & Austin. Justice See then joined the faculty at the University of Alabama School of Law, where he served for over twenty years successively as Associate Professor, Full Professor, and Herbert D. Warner Professor of Law. In 1996, he was elected Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court.
Awards and Associations
Justice See has served as a contributing editor to the Federal Circuit Bar Journal, and he is a member of the American Law Institute, the Alabama Law Institute, the American Law and Economics Association, the Federalist Society, the American Bar Association, the Alabama State Bar Association, and V.O.C.A.L., a victims' rights advocacy group. He served as reporter for the Alabama Trade Secrets Acts and the revisions to the Alabama Trademark Law. Justice See has authored or edited over 40 books, chapters, articles, and reviews.
Justice See is an active member of First Baptist Church, Montgomery, where he teaches Sunday school, and was formerly an active member and deacon of Calvary Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa. He is a member and the founding President of the Carroll's Creek Volunteer Fire Department, which is now a fire protection district.
Opinion Piece in The Tennessean'"
In an opinion piece, Justice See proposed that judicial elections are foundationally consistent and the most pro-accountability option for choosing judges.
First, as recognized in the Declaration of Independence, government derives its powers from the people. The people of Tennessee in their constitution have declared that all appellate judges "shall be elected by the qualified voters."
Second, no one who exercises power over the lives of others should be unaccountable... The "Tennessee Plan" alternative to elections relies on an unaccountable judicial selection commission. The governor is restricted to choosing one of the three candidates offered by the commission — unless he rejects the entire list — and, therefore, he can hardly be blamed for appointing a judge who does not strictly adhere to the law. The public neither has the power to select nor the power to remove members of the commission if the names on the governor's candidate list owe more to who is on the commission than to the candidate's commitment to follow the law.
The real question, then, is whether we trust the voters with the constitutional function of choosing their judges. The only interest the public has is good government.[1]
Karl Rove a supporter of See
For the 1994 Alabama Supreme Court races, a group called the Business Council of Alabama hired Rove to help run a slate of Republican candidates for the state supreme court. No Republican had been elected to that court in more than a century. Harold Frend See, Jr. ran against Mark Kennedy, an incumbent Democratic judge and the son-in-law of George Wallace. The race included charges that Kennedy was mingling campaign funds with those of a non-profit children's foundation he was involved with. A former Rove staffer reported that some within the See camp initiated a "whisper" campaign that Kennedy was a pedophile. Kennedy won by less than one percentage point.
In 1996, for See's campaign for Associate Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a former campaign worker charged that, at Rove's behest, he distributed flyers that anonymously attacked Harold See--their own candidate. This, then, put the opponent's campaign in an awkward position as public denials of responsibility for the flyers would be implausible. See was elected.[2]
See Also
External Links
- Alabama Judicial System: Harold Frend See, Jr.
- Alabama Judicial System
- No NCAA Case
- Members of the Court
- See's Political Base Biography
- Court TV Commemorates Anniversary of Historic Voting Rights Act
- NNBD.com
- Supreme Court justice says he will not seek re-election
