How Judges Are Appointed Across the Six Countries

Judicial appointment is a wiring question: who picks the judge, for how long, and who decides if that judge keeps the job. Those three answers predict behavior. A judge who needs reappointment from the same executive who made the first appointment has an obvious incentive to avoid rulings that anger that executive. A judge with a single, secure, fixed term owes nothing to anyone for the rest of the career, and so can rule against the government without risking the job.

Mexico shows the mixed model: the president nominates a Supreme Court justice, and the Senate must approve by a two-thirds vote. Once seated, Mexican justices serve a fixed fifteen-year term with no reappointment, which insulates them from needing to please the president again. Compare that to systems where top judges serve renewable terms and face reappointment by the same executive or ruling party, as is closer to the case in Russia and China, where court independence is weaker and judges have personal reasons to stay aligned with the government. Iran layers in clerical oversight through the Guardian Council, the UK relies on an independent Judicial Appointments Commission insulated from the executive, and Nigeria's judges are appointed by the president with legislative confirmation but enjoy tenure protections.

This topic is the payoff of the unit's wiring-diagram approach: once you've mapped who appoints executives and legislators, judicial appointment shows where a fourth wire, the courts, either plugs into that same power source or runs independently. A court wired into the executive's reappointment power is not a true check; a court with fixed, secure tenure can be.