Tennessee Plan

The Tennessee Plan is a system used to appoint and elect appellate court judges in Tennessee. The system required candidates be selected by a nominating commission and therefore plays a significant role in the selection of the state's judiciary. It is largely patterned after the Missouri Plan, and an earlier version in Tennessee was called the Modified Missouri Plan.

The Tennessee Plan provided that appellate court vacancies must be filled by one of three nominees submitted by the Judicial Nominating Commission and approved by the governor of Tennessee from a panel. At the next general election and at the end of every eight-year term, voters' input is limited to deciding whether each judge shall be retained through a yes-no election.

This system applies to the Tennessee Supreme Court, the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. The next regular election for state judges will be in August 2022. In November 2014 a referendum on formally adopting the Tennessee Plan as an amendment to the Tennessee Constitution, clarifying its status, was held, and the Plan's provisions were formally added to the Constitution, modified only slightly in that the governor can now select his own nominees to the courts without the input from a commission, and that nominees must be confirmed or disapparoved by the General Assembly, which must vote whether to do so within 60 days of the nominee's selection if it is in session, and within 60 days of the convening of the next session if it is not in session at the time of the appointment, and if no vote is taken within this deadline, the nominees are considered to have been confirmed by default. [2]

Until the ratification of the constitutional amendment in 2014, when a vacancy occurred, the Judicial Nominating Commission accepted applications from any qualified Tennessee lawyer. Typical qualifications include age, residency, and proper professional standing. The commission then chose three nominees from the applications received. The commission submitted these three nominees—altogether called a panel—to the governor of Tennessee. Residency qualifications included not only state citizenship, but also citizenship within a particular Grand Division.

...
Wikipedia