Clark County attorneys say 5 judges should get the boot

Clark County lawyers gave positive feedback on most judges in the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s 2025 Judicial Performance Evaluation, but they thought five should be forced to hang up their robes.

The survey, which aims to inform voters by identifying the best and worst on the bench, asked questions about 101 judges from the Nevada Supreme Court, state Court of Appeals, Clark County District Court and multiple lower courts.

“I think lawyers in this community, especially those who have practiced here for a long time and have had the opportunity to participate in multiple previous Judicial Performance Evaluations, recognize the importance of this project in judicial election years,” Review-Journal Executive Editor Glenn Cook said. “These ratings are not meant to overly praise or embarrass judges, but simply to provide information to voters where, for the most part, there’s a gigantic void.”

Judicial candidates may file to run for office from Jan. 5 to Jan. 16. The field is expected to be crowded in 2026, when all District Court and Family Court judgeships will be on the ballot.

Highlights of the survey are rolling out in print today and next Sunday.

This year, 790 attorneys weighed in anonymously on judges, out of 5,666 who received the evaluation, yielding a rate of return of nearly 14 percent.

UNLV’s Center for Research, Evaluation and Assessment conducted the survey, which the Review-Journal has spearheaded 14 times since 1992. The most recent poll was conducted in 2019, when respondents thought 11 judges should be voted out of office.

The UNLV center director, Bradley Marianno, said most judges performed well this year.

Attorneys rated them on a five-point scale via questions that fell into three main buckets: administrative ability, legal ability and integrity. The retention score — or percentage of attorneys who wanted a judge to stay on the bench — is also key to the survey.

Respondents recommended retention for over 95 percent of judges, and the average retention score was 75.6 percent. Responses also were positive for the categories of administrative ability and integrity but were “harsher” for legal ability, the UNLV researchers noted in a report.

“Attorneys clearly believe that a good portion of our judiciary is doing a very good job and that the number of exceptionally poor judges is quite low, and I think that’s good news for the community overall,” Cook said.

Administrative ability included categories like attentiveness and familiarity with the case record. Legal ability addressed questions related to applying the law with accuracy, weighing evidence and arguments fairly, and clearly explaining decisions. Integrity dealt with questions like whether judges’ behavior was free from the appearance of impropriety and whether they showed bias.

Marianno said survey questions grouped cleanly into the three constructs.

“When you’re administering a survey, you actually want multiple questions to measure a given idea or concept,” he said.

Though few judges failed to receive a retention recommendation, some others came close, which Marianno said could raise alarm bells.

Even with a retention score of 60 percent, a judge is below average.

When a judge is at or below that score, “that’s signifying that something’s going on there, that this isn’t just due to chance, that perhaps, there’s some real performance downsides going on there that need to be looked at,” Marianno said.

Las Vegas Justice Court and Clark County District Court had the lowest ratings for retention, administrative ability, legal ability and integrity, according to Marianno, but they are also the courts in which most attorneys practice.

“It does seem like changes on those two courts are warranted,” he said.

The lawyers who filled out surveys reflected a broad range of practice specialties, but most were male — 57.6 percent — and the respondents had an average of over 11 years of experience.

Data from the State Bar of Nevada shows that 36.3 percent of members are female and 63.6 percent are male. Marianno said those statistics indicate that survey respondents are “generally representative.”

He noted that female judges were slightly less likely to be recommended for retention than their male counterparts.

“What we found is that there is an 86 percent chance that a respondent would answer yes to retain a female judge and a 93 percent chance that a respondent would answer yes to a male judge,” Marianno said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.