Suchergebnisse

WILLIAM PENN IS, of course, best known for founding Pennsylvania as a safe haven for Quakers and for his commit-ment to religious tolerance in general. Unexplored in the vast amount of secondary literature on this iconic figure is his role in the origins of judicial tenure during good behavior, the institutional safeguard by which a judge can be removed for serious cause only that, together with adequate and secure judicial compensation, helped make the judiciary an independent and coordinate branch of government. In fact, two influen-tial articles on judicial tenure in New Jersey, Donald L. Kemmerer's "Judges' Good Behavior Tenure in Colonial New Jersey" and Jerome J. Nadelhaft's "Politics and the Judicial Tenure Fight in Colonial New Jersey," do not say a word about Penn, even though he was one of the early proprietors of that colony. J. Paul Selsam likewise overlooks Penn's con-tributions to judicial independence in his important article about the his-tory of judicial tenure in Pennsylvania, and Joseph H. Smith's oft-cited 1976 article "An Independent Judiciary: The Colonial Background" is similarly silent about Penn's role.