What do Metropolitan Mortgage’s bankruptcy, River Park Square’s financing, gay marriage and Washington state’s unpopular new primary election structure have in common?

Answer: Those and myriad other major issues are decided in the courts.

Hot-button social issues such as abortion and the gamut of environmental challenges, from timber management to dam breaching to nuclear waste cleanup – all of them follow paths that may wind through legislative assemblies and across gubernatorial desks but eventually wind up in courts of law. Often several courts of law.

This is worth mentioning in the midst of a political campaign in which several judicial positions are to be decided, from the county to the state Supreme Court level. Despite the profound and lasting impact those offices have on citizens’ lives, they attract comparatively little interest from voters.

Voters pay scrupulous attention to the contests for governor and president and Congress and even county commissioner – offices whose action on contentious issues has to pass muster with the courts. Meanwhile, judicial races make hardly a blip on the political seismograph.

Judicial candidates commonly scratch their heads about the disregard they encounter as they campaign. Nobody seems to be paying attention. But the candidates don’t help matters with their own rigid adherence to a code of near silence.

The state Code of Judicial Conduct, they explain, prevents them from tipping their hand about how they might deal with issues that could go before the court. Canon 7 of that code says they can’t: “make pledges or promises of conduct in office other than the faithful and impartial performance of the duties of the office;” or “make statements that commit or appear to commit the candidate with respect to cases, controversies or issues that are likely to come before the court.”

Clearly it would be a disaster if judicial candidates ran around telling voters how they would rule on a prospective case or issue. As it is now, though, judicial candidates don’t respond to broad questions intended merely to fill in a candidate’s philosophical profile.

They will spell out their years and type of experience, where they went to law school, who’s endorsing them, details of their family lives and upbringing. But they won’t say if they’re liberal or conservative, if they are “strict constructionists” or have a more expansive view of the Constitution, if they think the courts are too lenient or too harsh on criminals.

It’s not that judges don’t have such attitudes or that their decisions wouldn’t be influenced by their personal philosophies (how else would you reconcile Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s opinions with Antonin Scalia’s?), just that the voters are prevented from knowing what those attitudes are.

We’re not interested in compromising the integrity and impartiality of the justice system, but we think there’s considerable room to relax Canon 7 in the interest of informed voting.