Not that I have the impression that Minnesota Supreme Court Justice G. Barry Anderson and Chief Justice Eric Magnuson were terribly agonized about the decision to recuse themselves from hearing the appeal in the Franken/Coleman Election Contest appeal, but whatever doubts they may have harbored should be over when they saw yesterday's ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Caperton v. Massey.

In Caperton, the court held that Justice Brent Benjamin of West Virginia's Supreme Court of Appeals should have recused himself (but didn't) from hearing the appeal of a $50 million judgment against the A.T. Massey Coal Co. because, while the case was making its way to the West Virginia Supremes, the chairman of Massey contributed more than $3 million (more than all the rest of Benjamin's contributors combined) to get Benjamin elected to the bench.

Benjamin declined several petitions urging him to recuse himself, then cast the deciding vote in favor of Massey, overturning the big judgment. (It does seem a little suspicious, eh? Benjamin ruled that there was no objective evidence that he was biased in the case.)

Normally, the question of recusal is left entirely to the judgment of the judge. And there has never been a previous case where the U.S. Supremes have overruled a judge's decision not to recuse himself based on campaign contributions. As judicial elections become more partisan and politicized, this may be a growing area of jurisprudence.

That all may sound far afield from matters Coleman-Franken. (Some of the MN Supremes have given campaign contributions to Coleman, and some to DFLers, but the amounts were small and none of them received contributions from either of the parties in the suit.)

But the SCOTUS majority in Caperton went out of its way to say that the constitutional due process clause requires that judges must also recuse themselves from cases that would require them to rule on matters on which they had previously participated. The justices cited the principle that “no man can be a judge in his own case.”

Magnuson and Anderson served as members of the Minnesota State Canvassing Board that conducted the recount in the pre-contest phase of the Coleman-Franken dispute. Several rulings in which they participated generated controversies that carried all the way through the contest phase and into the Supreme Court appeal. If Magnuson and Anderson had heard the appeal, they would have been ruling on the merits of their own prior rulings. For that reason, I suspect it was pretty close to a no-brainer for them to decide to sit out the appeal. But either way, I hope they enjoyed a moment of satisfaction when they read Caperton, which included an indirect endorsement of their decision to recuse.

Before I return you to regular programming, I'll just comment again that the recount and legal rulings in the Franken-Coleman case have been impressively free of overt partisanship, especially compared with other hotly disputed election cases (I'm thinking of Bush v. Gore, but over the past months I've become familiar with many other cases, and the Minnesota system looks very good in comparison to many of them).

I've heard some Republicans expressing regret that two smart Pawlenty appointees (i.e., Magnuson and Anderson) were out of the picture when the Supremes heard Coleman's appeal. The irony, after the Caperton ruling, is that if Magnuson and Anderson had sat on the case after sitting on the Canvassing Board, their participation itself might have been grounds for Coleman to appeal an adverse ruling to the U.S. Supremes.