Earlier this month the Supreme Court ruled that elected judges must recuse themselves from the bench when their own big donors' interests are at stake. With Illinois' judicial races raising record-setting amounts of campaign cash -- becoming a national example of a system is ripe for abuse -- the decision is already sending ripples through the state's legal community. Northwestern University law professor John McGinnis tells the St. Louis Post Dispatch that the ruling is likely to open "a Pandora's box," inspiring a flood of claims that judges in the Prairie State themselves should have opted for recusal.

The only way to avoid this avalanche of complaints, legal experts agree, is for the legislature or high court to step in and clarify exactly what is the threshold for impartiality. The Dispatch explains this "quandary":

This year Illinois lawmakers blew an historic opportunity to curb the influence of campaign cash in judicial elections, and that's left the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform's David Morrison with little confidence that the General Assembly is up for any sort of fundamental reform. "The Supreme Court is absolutely right that the judges look like they're being bought," he tells us, pointing out that many of the largest donations in judicial races have been funneled through party leaders.

With incumbents, along with committeemen, set to wield a great deal of political influence in the 2010 election cycle, ICPR says it's no wonder that substantive reforms -- including Sen. Kwame Raoul's proposal for publicly-financing certain judicial races -- were sidelined. There's a lot at stake next year with four seats on the Illinois Supreme Court potentially up for grabs (depending upon whether the justices run for retention or decide to retire), along with a host of statewide appelate court races.

Now Morrison is pinning his hopes on the Supreme Court stepping in to settle the underlying question: At what point do campaign contributions amount to influence peddling? At the state level, he says, "the only real solution is to insulate judges from this kind of financing."