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Matthew Durrant
2000 - Present
2034
25
Matthew Durrant is a judge of the Utah Supreme Court. He assumed office in 2000. His current term ends on December 31, 2034.
Durrant ran for re-election for judge of the Utah Supreme Court. He won in the retention election on November 5, 2024.
Durrant was elected by his peers as chief justice of the court on April 1, 2012.[1]
Durrant first became a member of the Utah Supreme Court when he was appointed in January 2000 by Gov. Michael Leavitt (R). To read more about judicial selection in Utah, click here.[2]
In 2020, Ballotpedia published Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship, a study examining the partisan affiliation of all state supreme court justices in the country. As part of this study, we assigned each justice a Confidence Score describing our confidence in the degree of partisanship exhibited by the justices' past partisan behavior, before they joined the court.[3] Durrant received a confidence score of Mild Republican.[4] Click here to read more about this study.
Biography
Durrant earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1984.[5]Before his appointment to the supreme court, Durrant taught at Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School, clerked for Monroe McKay of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, and worked in private practice in Salt Lake City. Durrant has also worked as a trial judge for the Third District Court.[2]
Elections
2024
See also: Utah Supreme Court elections, 2024
Utah Supreme Court
Matthew Durrant was retained to the Utah Supreme Court on November 5, 2024 with 77.3% of the vote.
Retention Vote |
% |
Votes |
|||
| ✔ | Yes |
77.3
|
958,760 | ||
No |
22.7
|
281,663 | |||
Total Votes |
1,240,423 | ||||
|
|
Endorsements
Ballotpedia did not identify endorsements for Durrant in this election.
2014
Durrant was retained to the Supreme Court with 77.6 percent of the vote on November 4, 2014. [6]
Performance evaluations
The Utah Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission, following a 2014 survey, recommended that Chief Justice Durrant be Retained. The full report is available here.
2000
Durrant became a member of the Utah Supreme Court in January 2000 when he was appointed by Gov. Michael Leavitt (R).[2]
Campaign themes
2024
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Matthew Durrant did not complete Ballotpedia's 2024 Candidate Connection survey.
Campaign finance summary
Note: The finance data shown here comes from the disclosures required of candidates and parties. Depending on the election or state, this may represent only a portion of all the funds spent on their behalf. Satellite spending groups may or may not have expended funds related to the candidate or politician on whose page you are reading this disclaimer. Campaign finance data from elections may be incomplete. For elections to federal offices, complete data can be found at the FEC website. Click here for more on federal campaign finance law and here for more on state campaign finance law.
Analysis
Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship (2020)
Last updated: June 15, 2020
In 2020, Ballotpedia published Ballotpedia Courts: State Partisanship, a study examining the partisan affiliation of all state supreme court justices in the country as of June 15, 2020.
The study presented Confidence Scores that represented our confidence in each justice's degree of partisan affiliation. This was not a measure of where a justice fell on an ideological spectrum, but rather a measure of how much confidence we had that a justice was or had been affiliated with a political party. The scores were based on seven factors, including but not limited to party registration.[7]
The five resulting categories of Confidence Scores were:
- Strong Democrat
- Mild Democrat
- Indeterminate[8]
- Mild Republican
- Strong Republican
This justice's Confidence Score, as well as the factors contributing to that score, is presented below. The information below was current as of June 2020.
Matthew
Durrant
Utah
- Partisan Confidence Score:
Mild Republican - Judicial Selection Method:
Assisted appointment through governor controlled judicial nominating commission - Key Factors:
- Appointed by a Republican governor
- State was a Republican trifecta at time of appointment
Partisan Profile
Details:
Durrant was appointed in 2000 by Gov. Michael Leavitt (R). At the time of his appointment, Utah was a Republican trifecta.
Other Scores:
Bonica and Woodruff campaign finance scores (2012)
In October 2012, political science professors Adam Bonica and Michael Woodruff of Stanford University attempted to determine the partisan ideology of state supreme court justices. They created a scoring system in which a score above 0 indicated a more conservative-leaning ideology, while scores below 0 were more liberal.
Durrant received a campaign finance score of 0.8, indicating a conservative ideological leaning. This was more conservative than the average score of 0.45 that justices received in Utah.
The study was based on data from campaign contributions by the judges themselves, the partisan leaning of those who contributed to the judges' campaigns, or, in the absence of elections, the ideology of the appointing body (governor or legislature). This study was not a definitive label of a justice, but an academic summary of various relevant factors.[9]
State supreme court judicial selection in Utah
- See also: Judicial selection in Utah
The five justices of the supreme court are selected through assisted appointment. The governor selects a nominee from a list of recommended candidates from a judicial nominating commission. The nominee then must attain approval from the Utah Senate.
New appointees serve for at least three years, after which they must run in a yes-no retention election. If retained, supreme court justices serve subsequent terms of ten years.[10]
Qualifications
To serve on the Utah Supreme Court, a judge must be:
- a citizen of the United States;
- a state resident for at least five years;
- admitted to practice law in the state;
- at least 30 years old; and
- no more than 75 years old.[10]
Chief justice
The chief justice of the supreme court is selected by peer vote. The chief justice of the supreme court serves in that capacity for four years.[10]
Vacancies
When a vacancy occurs on the court, the governor appoints a replacement from a list of seven names recommended by a nominating commission. The nominee then must attain approval from the Utah Senate. New appointees serve for at least three years, after which they must run in a yes-no retention election. If retained, supreme court justices serve subsequent terms of ten years.[10]
The map below highlights how vacancies are filled in state supreme courts across the country.
See also
External links
|
Officeholder Utah Supreme Court |
Footnotes
- ↑ Deseret News, "Utah Supreme Court chief justice stepping down, plans to stay on court," January 23, 2012
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Utah Courts, "Associate Chief Justice Matthew B. Durrant," accessed July 29, 2021
- ↑ We calculated confidence scores by collecting several data points such as party registration, donations, and previous political campaigns.
- ↑ The five possible confidence scores were: Strong Democrat, Mild Democrat, Indeterminate, Mild Republican, and Strong Republican.
- ↑ Project Vote Smart, "Matthew Durrant's Biography," accessed July 29, 2021
- ↑ Utah Elections, "2014 Candidate Filings," accessed March 27, 2014
- ↑ The seven factors were party registration, donations made to partisan candidates, donations made to political parties, donations received from political parties or bodies with clear political affiliation, participation in political campaigns, the partisanship of the body responsible for appointing the justice, and state trifecta status when the justice joined the court.
- ↑ An Indeterminate score indicates that there is either not enough information about the justice’s partisan affiliations or that our research found conflicting partisan affiliations.
- ↑ Stanford University, "State Supreme Court Ideology and 'New Style' Judicial Campaigns," October 31, 2012
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 American Judicature Society, "Methods of Judicial Selection," accessed August 20, 2021
Federal courts:
Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals • U.S. District Court: District of Utah • U.S. Bankruptcy Court: District of Utah
State courts:
Utah Supreme Court • Utah Court of Appeals • Utah District Courts • Utah Juvenile Courts • Utah Justice Courts
State resources:
Courts in Utah • Utah judicial elections • Judicial selection in Utah
| |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Current judges | Matthew Durrant, Diana Hagen, John A. Pearce, Paige Petersen, Jill Pohlman | ||
| Former judges | Christine Durham, Deno Himonas, Thomas Rex Lee, Ronald E. Nehring | ||
| ||||||||||
