ST. LOUIS — If you have what it takes to be a St. Louis City Circuit Court judge, then the 22nd Circuit Judicial Commission might be looking for you.
The commission is looking for applicants to fill the seat on the bench left vacant by the resignation effective earlier this year of Judge Robert H. Dierker. "The commission encourages qualified individuals to apply for this vacant judicial office," the commission said in its announcement issued on Feb. 21.
"Qualifications for circuit judge may be found in Article V, Section 21 of the Missouri Constitution."
Those who've already applied for vacancies created when Judge Dennis Schaumann retired or Judge Timothy Boyer appointment as circuit judge may also be considered for the Judge Dierker vacancy, according to the commission's announcement.
Applicants have until 5 p.m. on March 13 to get their applications to 22nd Circuit Judicial Commission Chairman James M. Dowd, chief judge of Missouri's Eastern District Court of Appeals, according to the commission's announcement.
"The commission will meet to interview and select the nominees to be submitted to the governor starting at 8:30 a.m. April 5, 2018, in the Division Courtroom of the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, at 815 Olive Street, St. Louis, Missouri," the announcement said. "The interviews are open to the public."
Under the state's nonpartisan court plan, the commission will select three candidates for the Judge Dierker vacancy for selection by Gov. Eric Greitens.
Judge Dierker resigned from the bench as of the first of this year to become chief trial assistant to City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. First appointed circuit judge by Gov. John Ashcroft in 1986 and re-elected five times, Dierker is author of the 2006 book "The Tyranny of Tolerance: A Sitting Judge Breaks the Code of Silence to Expose the Liberal Judicial Assault." In that book, Dierker claimed a prevalent and pervasive liberal bias exists in the judiciary. Dierker notably presided over nine capital murder trials, partial birth abortion cases and, in 1990, over the Times Beach dioxin trial, according to an online biography.
The successful applicant for Dierker's vacant circuit court seat will enter an arena with a less-than-stellar reputation, in large part because of huge verdicts, particularly massive talc-related awards in recent years, with the highest in the nation in 2016-17 coming from St. Louis' circuit court. The Alabama law firm Beasley Allen has been especially alleged to have filed in St. Louis because the circuit court has been "friendly" to plaintiffs in talc cases.
This past December, the American Tort Reform Foundation (ATRF) ranked St. Louis as No. 3 in its 2017-2018 "judicial hellhole" list, a marked improvement since the prior year's ranking that placed St. Louis Circuit Court as the nation's worst court. The ranking prompted state lawmakers last month to push for tort reform, after a similar effort stalled in the general assembly last spring.
Missouri ranked 49th out of 50 U.S. states in the "2017 Lawsuit Climate Survey: Ranking the States," conducted by Harris Poll and published by U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, which owns this publication. However, the state's tort reform efforts didn't factor into that national poll.