New York's Governor Eliot Spitzer has been busy these days, promoting new campaign donation limits for statewide and legislative races. He's also taking on what he sees as New York's "convoluted, politicized, outdated and expensive" court system, by, among other things proposing a Clean Elections-style public financing system for state Supreme Court candidates. Clean Elections has the potential to not only counter the conflict of interest that arises when lawyers are giving campaign cash to judges, but also to put some controls on increasingly expensive judicial races. Public financing has worked well for judicial races in North Carolina, and New York joins states like New Mexico, Washington, Wisconsin, and Montana in exploring the benefits a full public financing option could have for an independent judiciary.