The Endorsement Wasn’t the Problem. The Letterhead Was.

Two Oakland County district judges endorsed a Macomb County circuit court candidate on official court stationery. Michigan’s own guidance for people seeking judicial office identifies that as the one thing the letter should not have done.

What the campaign published

On or about August 20, 2026, the Facebook page for Genevieve Taylor for Macomb County Circuit Court Judge posted an image of a letter and thanked two judges by name for their support. The post carried campaign hashtags and, as of the time this article was prepared, showed 88 reactions, 10 comments, and 11 shares.

The attached document is dated August 18, 2026. It is addressed to Genevieve L. Taylor at a Mount Clemens address. The subject line identifies her as a candidate for appointment to a 16th Circuit Court judicial vacancy. The body opens by informing her that she has “our enthusiastic endorsement in your campaign” for the 16th Judicial Circuit Court in Macomb County. It praises her legal experience, her service as a magistrate, and her work with treatment courts at both the circuit and district levels. It is signed by Kowalkowski and by Meinecke.

The document sits on official 44th District Court stationery. The header carries the Michigan state seal, the court name, the Royal Oak street address, the court phone number, both judges listed as district judges in the upper left, and Court Administrator Tamara Boné in the upper right.

What the guidance actually says about the stationery

The State Bar of Michigan publishes a guidebook for lawyers and sitting judges moving toward judicial office. It has a section titled Letterhead. That section is not ambiguous and it is not buried.

It states that a sitting judge may send a signed letter encouraging a vote for another judicial candidate provided the letter is not on court letterhead and is not used for fundraising. It then explains the reasoning: judges should be aware that the correspondence must stay off court letterhead in order to avoid the appearance that the court is supporting the candidate, or that the judge is endorsing in a professional capacity. It closes the section by stating that correspondence may only be sent on personal stationery.

The rationale is Canon 2 of the Michigan Code of Judicial Conduct, which addresses impropriety and the appearance of impropriety. Canon 2(C) instructs that a judge should not use the prestige of office to advance the interests of others.

What the signature blocks got right

Here is the part that gets skipped in most versions of this conversation, and it matters because it cuts toward the judges.

The same guidance section that addresses letterhead also addresses how a judge should sign. It permits a judge to reference the role, using a construction such as judge of a named court, while instructing that the judge should not sign the correspondence as though writing in the office itself, with the title placed in front of the name.

Both signature blocks on this letter follow that instruction. Kowalkowski signed his name, with 44th District Court Judge underneath. Meinecke signed his name, with 44th District Court Chief Judge underneath. Neither signed as Judge Andrew Kowalkowski or Judge Derek Meinecke.

That is worth stating plainly. Whoever drafted this letter was working from something. The format tracks the guidance closely enough that the signature blocks read as deliberate. Which makes the letterhead the isolated defect rather than a general indifference to the rules, and it makes the question sharper, not softer: if the signature convention was observed, why was the stationery convention not?

Two tracks were running at the same time

The letter is doing two jobs at once, and the ambiguity is inside the document rather than imposed on it from outside.

The subject line identifies Taylor as a candidate for appointment to a 16th Circuit Court judicial vacancy. That is the executive branch track. A judge leaves the bench, the State Bar posts the vacancy, applicants file through the Governor’s portal, and supporters may submit letters of recommendation to the appointments office.

The body of the letter is written in a different register. It informs Taylor that she has an enthusiastic endorsement in her campaign, and it closes by stating pride in endorsing that campaign and wishing her success. That is election language.

Both descriptions were accurate on August 18. Taylor had cleared the August 4 primary and was on the November 3 general election ballot. She was also, by the letter’s own subject line, in the appointment pool. The public record available for this article does not establish whether the appointment vacancy and the seat Taylor is contesting in November are the same seat, and this article does not assume they are.

The strongest argument for the judges, and where it stops

Any honest treatment of this has to state the counterargument at full strength, so here it is.

Michigan’s Code of Judicial Conduct, at Canon 2(E), expressly contemplates that a judge may respond to requests for personal references. The appointment vacancy notice invited additional letters of recommendation. A national survey of judicial ethics guidance published by the National Center for State Courts identifies Michigan as one of the states with no specific code provision or advisory opinion governing whether judges may use court stationery for letters of recommendation. The letterhead passage in the State Bar guidebook is written around letters encouraging a vote, which is election language. On that reading, a recommendation letter into an appointment process is a different animal, and the guidebook’s letterhead sentence does not squarely reach it.

That argument is real. It is also incomplete, for three reasons.

First, the letter does not describe itself as a personal reference. It describes itself as an endorsement of a campaign, and it closes by wishing that campaign success. Whatever channel prompted it, the drafters chose campaign vocabulary.

Second, the letter was not sent to the appointments office. It was addressed to the candidate, who published it. A personal reference submitted to a decision maker and an endorsement handed to a candidate for distribution are not the same instrument, even when the text is identical.

Third, the underlying concern in Canon 2 does not depend on which selection track is in play. The concern is that a reader will perceive the court as taking a position. A voter scrolling past a seal, a court name, and a court administrator’s title does not stop to determine whether the document originated in a gubernatorial appointment file. The seal does the work either way. That is precisely why the guidance treats the stationery as the controlled item.

A court program inside an endorsement

One paragraph of the letter has received almost no attention and deserves some.

The letter thanks Taylor for her support of Operation Drive and for her interest in helping expand it into Macomb County. Operation Drive is a 44th District Court program. It is one of several initiatives the court’s judges have publicly promoted, alongside its Justice 101 school program, its teen court, and its hybrid drug and alcohol court. Press coverage of the court’s driver license restoration work describes partnerships with the Secretary of State, the City of Royal Oak, the Detroit Justice Center, DTE Energy, and United Way.

Those are good programs. That is not the issue. The issue is that a court program, run with public partners and public resources, appears inside a document endorsing a candidate for a different court in a different county. The letter is, in that paragraph, describing a benefit flowing to the court’s own initiative from the candidate it is endorsing. Nothing in the record suggests any arrangement, and this article alleges none. But institutional interest is exactly the category of appearance Canon 2 is drafted to keep out of campaign material, and it is the second reason the stationery choice compounds rather than isolates the problem.

The name that did not sign

Court Administrator Tamara Boné’s name and title appear in the header of this letter. She did not sign it. There is no indication in the public record that she reviewed it, approved it, or knew it would be published.

That is the structural cost of using institutional stationery for a personal act. Letterhead is not a decorative element. It is an assertion of who is speaking. Everyone named on it is placed inside a communication whether or not they participated in it, and staff have no practical mechanism to object to a document issued over the signatures of the judges who supervise them.

There is no records request that fixes this

The ordinary accountability move here would be a public records request. Ask the 44th District Court for its written policy on letterhead use. Ask whether one exists. Ask who authorizes it.

That request cannot be made. Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, at MCL 15.232, excludes the judiciary from the statutory definition of a public body. District courts, circuit courts, and probate courts are not subject to FOIA, and neither is the county clerk when acting as clerk of the circuit court.

So the only two paths available to a member of the public are a complaint to the Judicial Tenure Commission, whose investigative file is confidential unless the Commission authorizes a formal complaint, or the path taken here, which is reading the document the campaign published against the guidance the State Bar published and describing the gap.

Why the line exists

Let me be direct about what this piece is and is not arguing, because judicial ethics coverage tends to collapse into a fight about whether someone is a good judge.

This is not about whether Genevieve Taylor is qualified. It is not about whether Judges Kowalkowski and Meinecke are entitled to hold and express an opinion about her. They are, and Michigan says so in writing.

It is about whether the institutional appearance of a taxpayer-funded court should carry a campaign endorsement into a voter’s feed. Michigan’s own guidance answers that question, and the answer is no, for a reason that has nothing to do with the merits of any candidate. A court that appears to take sides in the selection of judges has spent something it cannot easily earn back, and it spends it on behalf of everyone who will later stand in front of it.

The judges did nearly everything the guidance asks. They signed correctly. They asked for nothing. They wrote a letter that was, by any reading, sincere.

Then someone reached for the wrong sheet of paper.

Sometimes the issue isn’t the endorsement. It’s the letterhead.