Why Tennessee Urgently Needs to Reform its Judicial Ethics System

The Tennessee Court of the Judiciary was established by the state legislature in 1979 as a formal mechanism to investigate and discipline judges accused of misconduct. Decades later, following systemic gridlock, it was replaced in 2012 by the Tennessee Board of Judicial Conduct. While the name changed, the core structural flaw remained identical: a self-policing architecture that prioritizes institutional self-preservation over public accountability. If Tennessee is to ever establish a fair, transparent legal system, it must fundamentally reform its judicial ethics system, beginning with the elimination of the insider majority that shields corrupt judges while weaponizing ethics rules against reform-minded outsiders.

At the heart of Tennessee’s judicial accountability crisis is a classic conflict of interest: the judges and the legal establishment completely control the board that is supposed to regulate them. Currently, the 16-member Board of Judicial Conduct is heavily weighted in favor of legal insiders. It consists of judges from various court levels and practicing attorneys. Because judges and lawyers make up the overwhelming majority of the board’s seats, the system functions less like an independent watchdog and more like a protective guild. When a citizen files a complaint against a judge, that complaint is evaluated, investigated, and judged almost entirely by the target’s peers and professional colleagues. This insider domination creates an environment where minor administrative infractions by ordinary citizens are heavily penalized, while egregious judicial overreach is quietly dismissed or settled with private reprimands. [1, 2, 3, 4]

This consolidation of power is further reinforced by the state's appointment process. The members of the Board of Judicial Conduct are appointed through a tightly controlled pipeline dominated by the state government and the legal elite. The appointments are split among the Speaker of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the Tennessee Supreme Court, along with judicial conferences and legal associations that recommend or select candidates. Because the appointing authorities are deeply embedded within the existing political and legal hierarchy, the board naturally reflects the status quo. There is zero structural incentive to appoint aggressive reformers who might disrupt the comfortable relationships shared between the bench, the bar, and the legislature.

The necessity for deep structural reform is laid bare by a history of shocking, high-profile scandals within the Tennessee state judiciary—scandals that highlight how poorly the insider system manages corruption and abuse. For years, the bench has been rocked by egregious breaches of public trust. In Knox County, former Criminal Court Judge Richard Baumgartner operated for years under severe impairment, suffering from a severe addiction to prescription painkillers and alcohol. Baumgartner engaged in sexual relationships with a probationer in his own courtroom and bought drugs directly from her, all while continuing to hand down sentences. His inevitable downfall forced the costly overturning and retrial of major criminal trials, including landmark homicide cases.

More recently, the behavior of 13th Judicial District Circuit Court Judge Jonathan Lee Young further exposed the toothless nature of initial board actions. Young was investigated for using social media to send sexually explicit messages to multiple women—often utilizing a profile photo of himself wearing his official judicial robes. Shockingly, the recipients of these coercive messages included female legal professionals and a vulnerable litigant who had a child custody matter actively pending before him. Rather than being immediately removed, Young initially received a public reprimand and was allowed back on the bench, only to be fully suspended later in 2022 after engaging in another improper relationship with a woman whose husband had an active adoption case in his courtroom. These are not isolated incidents; they are the natural product of an oversight system that treats judicial misconduct as a professional embarrassment to be managed rather than a betrayal of public trust to be punished.

To break this cycle of protectionism, Tennessee must radically restructure the composition of the board to establish a majority of laypeople. True ethical enforcement cannot begin until ordinary citizens—people without law degrees, political ambitions, or cases pending before these very judges—hold the voting majority. A lay-majority board would shift the balance of power away from professional self-preservation and back toward public service. Citizens look at judicial behavior through the lens of basic fairness, common sense, and public trust, rather than hiding behind dense procedural technicalities or professional courtesy. By placing everyday Tennesseans in charge of judicial discipline, the state would finally inject true objectivity into a process that has been compromised by institutional bias for nearly half a century.

The danger of an insider-dominated board is not just that bad judges escape punishment; it is that the rules of ethics are actively inverted to punish those who challenge the system. In Tennessee, incumbent judges routinely use the rules of judicial and professional ethics to railroad independent attorneys who dare to run for office against them. In recent years, Tennessee's ethics board for lawyers has filed enforcement actions against nearly sixty attorneys who recently ran for public office. The problems have been so severe that one recent candidate asked the Civil Rights Division of the FBI to investigate the board. The state’s judicial election system is designed to favor the establishment, and when an outside attorney challenges an incumbent, the campaign quickly becomes a minefield.

Ultimately, Tennessee’s judicial ethics system is failing because it was built on the flawed premise that power can police itself. The transition from the 1979 Court of the Judiciary to the modern Board of Judicial Conduct proved that changing the letterhead does nothing if the underlying power structure remains untouched. As long as judges and lawyers appoint each other to judge one another, the system will remain a shield for the powerful and a sword against reformers. Tennessee must take the radical but necessary step of stripping the legal establishment of its majority and handing control of judicial ethics over to the people. Only then can the state ensure that the scales of justice are balanced for everyone, rather than tipped in favor of the robes.

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Elliott J. Schuchardt is the author of America’s Achilles Heel:  How to Protect Your Family When America Loses the Reserve Currency.  In 2026, Schuchardt was a candidate for the Tennessee General Assembly.