Ohio’s Republican supreme court candidates make a bid to unseat 6-1 court’s only Democratic justice
The candidates running on the Republican ticket to unseat the 6-1 Ohio Supreme Court’s one Democratic justice came to the law through different means, but they all claim that partisan politics won’t be a part of being a supreme court justice.
Races for the state’s top judicial positions were made explicitly partisan when Republican state lawmakers added party labels to the races starting in 2022, joining seven other states in the U.S.
With a recent decision, the current partisan Ohio Supreme Court made Ohio the first state in the nation to allow political endorsements from judges.
The Ohio Supreme Court has two seats up for election this year, one held by Brunner and the other held by Republican Justice Daniel Hawkins. The Republican primary for the nomination to challenge Brunner features four candidates.
From factories to farmland, the judges facing off in Tuesday’s May 5 primary say their experience outside of the courtroom feeds into their work ethic.
They say their career moves meet the qualifications to become the justice who would make the Ohio Supreme Court a full 7-0 Republican panel, should Hawkins defeat a Democratic challenge to his seat as well.
Judge Jill Flagg Lanzinger
Ninth District Court of Appeals Judge Jill Flagg Lanzinger worked midnights at a gas station, and with her mom at a factory in Seneca County before working her way up in the legal field.
Lanzinger interned for a public defender’s office, was mentored by an Akron judge, and worked for the Stark County Prosecutor’s Office, before becoming a judge in Barberton and Summit County. She’s served on the Ninth District Court of Appeals since 2023.
“I’m just a woman who likes the law, desires to do good, and would just really love to be on the supreme court and have these bigger issues,” Lanzinger told the Capital Journal.
Now in her seventh judicial election, the appellate judge fully supports the idea of voters getting their say in the judges that stand in the courtrooms of their communities, and in the panel answering the highest constitutional questions in the state.
“When you’re elected, you’re elected by the people, they can get to know you a little bit,” Lanzinger said. “But you have an obligation to follow the law … and if there’s something (voters) want to change in the justice system with the judiciary, or you don’t like something a judge is doing, then you can make a campaign and get them out.”
She says riding the line between campaigning for the job and adhering to legal ethics standards in not taking sides is something that is expected for judges and justices. In the same way as all of her competitors, Lanzinger considers herself a conservative.
“I think the word conservative is partly about my personal views, that I’m personally conservative, and I think the Constitution requires us to make sure that the government is limited,” Lanzinger said.
Her judicial philosophy on interpreting the law boils down to the thought that “most of the time, the words say what they say.”
“The (U.S.) Constitution says what it says, the Ohio Constitution says what it says, and the statutes say what they say, and then the question is does one conflict with the other,” Lanzinger said.
Colleen O’Donnell
Former Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Colleen O’Donnell came to the legal field honestly, as the daughter of now-retired Ohio Supreme Court Justice Terrence O’Donnell. But the judge has since moved her career from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office to a decade-long tenure in the Franklin County Common Pleas Court. She’s also served with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, and most recently as a federal immigration judge in Laredo, Texas.
“I was very comfortable in the immigration court, I was comfortable managing a busy docket, I was comfortable taking testimony and reviewing evidence for admissibility,” O’Donnell said.
The judge said she never granted asylum in any of the cases before her in the Texas court, while honoring her “oath and obligation to interpret the law with integrity and to approach every case with an open mind.”
Growing up with a father as a judge, O’Donnell and her siblings had a unique perspective into the importance of serving the public, she said, and how that work must be done without the presence of bias.
“Regardless of my personal, emotional feelings about what I think the law should say, or what might make it better, or what it might make it worse, I’m quite comfortable with how to compartmentalize, how to honor the oath that any judge should take to simply interpret the law,” O’Donnell said.
As part of interpreting the law as written, the judge said she believes in ruling on cases based on the language of legal statutes, “and give those words the meaning that they had at the time that they were enacted.”
“I do not take the view that the Constitution, for example, is a living, breathing document,” she said.
Judge Andrew King
For Fifth District Court of Appeals Judge Andrew King, the judicial field started with night classes at Capital University after he made the decision to change his career path.
“It was sort of a do-over for myself, put myself on a new path kind of thing,” King said.
Since then, King has worked as a private lawyer, public defender, assistant prosecuting attorney in Delaware County, and legal counsel for several agencies. In 2024, he returned to Capital as an adjunct law professor.
In considering cases during his career, and talking to voters during his campaign for the Ohio Supreme Court, King sees the law as a field that is “responsive to society.”
“It’s never really done, it just keeps going, and that’s why I think these issues ebb and flow and change over time,” King told the Capital Journal. “We’re encountering new things that we as a society prioritize and deprioritize.”
That includes topics like immigration, the Second Amendment, data centers, and even emerging technology.
“20 years ago we wouldn’t have been talking about AI, but now every conference I go to is about the impact of AI,” King said.
The direct impact of court proceedings is why the judge sees the importance of an elected judiciary. He encourages voters to research a judge’s previous rulings, history in the field, and the judges approach to cases as they decide who is right for their community.
“I think most voters get that who their judges are matters a lot, because that’s going to determine what the next step in the process is,” King said. “Are we going to need to go back to the lawmakers, are we going to need to do a rule amendment, are we going to need a constitutional amendment? How judges approach those things sort of determines the next steps.”
The approach judges take has to be different than that of lawmakers or the governor, for example, because there’s no room for promises other than following the law in the role of a judge, according to King.
“I can be conservative in my own personal life and my own personal views, but if the law, the constitution, dictates an outcome that maybe I personally would not prefer, well my oath and obligation as a judge is to follow the law,” King said. “So it’s not you recasting the law to fit a view, you deal with what’s right in front of you.”
Judge Ronald Lewis
After graduating from law school, Judge Ron Lewis spent some time in Washington, D.C., working as congressional legal counsel, but a postage-stamp-sized backyard drove a desire to get back to his family’s Greene County farm where he was born and raised, and worked in his family’s excavating business.
“I was probably a lawyer for at least 10 years before I’d spent more time behind a desk than I did in a field or a ditch,” Lewis said.
The now-Second District Court of Appeals judge, who was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine in 2022, previously served on the Xenia Municipal Court and as the city’s law director and prosecutor, along with work in private practice and on agencies from the Ohio State Highway Patrol to the Greene County Animal Control, according to a biography on the appellate court’s website.
But the Ohio Supreme Court is where the legal impact on voters really comes to a head, which is why Lewis is campaigning for a seat behind the bench.
“It’s that 1% of cases that go on to the Ohio Supreme Court that impact the majority of people in the state and society,” Lewis told the Capital Journal.
Like his fellow Republican candidates in the race, Lewis said he’s interpreted the law as written. He said that’s what voters want in a judge, even though it may not always bring a legal decision in the way they wish.
“While you might like it when I bend (interpretation of the law) in your direction today, I might bend it away from you the next day,” Lewis said. “I don’t have to be pro this or con that, because quite honestly, my opinion really shouldn’t matter … I apply (the law) as it was originally intended.”
Voter education
Lewis and the other Republican candidates for the state supreme court have spent their time campaigning on originalist ideals. For voters, they say there is a balance between educating the masses on the importance of judicial elections, and pointing to their own values as reasons to vote for them.
“Ultimately, you just have to educate people about who you are and what you stand for, and where you come from,” Lewis said. “Hopefully they relate to you.”
For O’Donnell, the votes cast in the May 5 primary are important not only because they show support for a particular candidate, but they drive the vote into the Nov. 3 general election.
“Having high voter engagement and as much participation from our electorate is what everyone on the ballot or off the ballot should seek,” O’Donnell said.
Upholding the law without promising voters a particular outcome leads judicial campaigns to be more like job interviews, the judges said.
“It’s a lot more work to keep your job, a lot more people contact,” according to Lanzinger. “When you’re looking at judges, these are the people who make those decisions and make sure that happens … so it’s important we look at judges and see if they’re doing that, see if they’re following the law.”
For King, a judicial philosophy is not chosen by a judge, but shown through the way in which they made decisions, and while judges shouldn’t be laying out how they’d rule on specific cases, the way one runs their courtroom should be indication enough of what kind of judge they are.
“So when I go talk to people, I say hey, I can’t tell you, and you don’t really want me to tell you how something’s going to come out, but I can tell you how I approach cases, and the methods and concepts that I use to try to help me resolve cases,” King said.