Five years ago, in “Opening the Doors: The Need for More Hispanic-American Judges,” I concluded that the low-level representation of Latinos in the state and federal judicial system of the United States would continue to be a serious problem for this society.

While the more than 48 million Latinos in the United States presently make up 14 percent of the country’s population, only 4 percent of state judges are Latinos. In the report, we projected that – if current trends continue – by 2050, when Latinos will make up more or less 24 percent of the populace, we will be represented by only 11 percent of state judges, a very wide gap in our representation at the state court level.

At present the percent of Latino judges in New York's state courts, where the Latino community comprises 16 percent of the population, stands at less than 5 percent.

The only area where Latino presence in the state is well represented is on Court TV!

Of the 10 such programs currently broadcast, four are presided over by Hispanics: “Judge María López,” “Cristina's Court,” Marilyn Milian in “The People's Court,” and “Judge Alex.”

Nevertheless, returning to the real world, the courageous and very honorable Margarita López Torres, who was a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn, was blocked in her race to obtain a seat on the New York Supreme Court bench by the Brooklyn Democratic Party, presided over by the convict Clarence Norman, because she refused to accept its attempts to make her hire a political writer. She took her case to court, and last year, in López Torres vs. the New York State Election Commission the conventional system for selecting judges was invalidated as unconstitutional.

Presently, the case has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court under the name Spitzer vs. López Torres. Spitzer now proposes a system based on a commission that would be empowered to make the final selection of judges, leaving the voters out of the process.

For the Latino community, the question is whether – as our political influence grows – this is the right moment to turn the judicial selection process over to the connoisseurs of the political process, or whether we should fight for a system that recognizes our growing political influence as voters supported by the protections of the Voting Rights Act.

It is true that there are possible alternatives between these two positions. What is clear is that a serious debate on the matter within the Latino community is urgently needed.

(Angelo Falcon is a political scientist and president and founder of the National Institute for Latino Politics, with headquarters in New York City.)