Polk County, along with Henderson and Transylvania, are lumped together in what is now called Court District 42. Judicial elections are partisan affairs around here, but I’ve always thought that was a particularly bad idea — for what I hope are obvious reasons — so I was pleased to discover that one of Polk County’s veteran lawyers, a woman who was appointed last year to fill a vacancy on the district court, is running to stay on the bench as an unaffiliated candidate, which is not an easy thing to do in this hyper-polarized country of ours.
Judges aren’t allowed to say much of anything that might attract media attention, so you’d probably think inviting her onto Polk Lore would a waste of time. But my conversation with Lora T. Baker was anything but. She even said a few things that might be considered a quasi-political, in a very limited and reasonable sense. We talked at the county courthouse in late January.
