A lawyer plans to ask the North Dakota Supreme Court to help him run for state district judge or Supreme Court justice this fall, saying Secretary of State Al Jaeger will not accept his petitions to get on the ballot.

Robert V. Bolinske of Bismarck is circulating separate petitions to challenge Supreme Court Justice Daniel Crothers and South Central District Judge Gail Hagerty, both of whom are unopposed for election.

Bolinske said Saturday that he has not decided which race he will run. Independent candidates for statewide political offices must submit petition signatures from at least 300 voters by 5 p.m. Sept. 5 to qualify for the ballot.

North Dakota's Supreme Court justices and district judges run on the state's no-party ballot, meaning they are not listed as candidates of a political party.

Jaeger said North Dakota law does not allow independent candidacies on the no-party ballot. Those officeholders must run in North Dakota's June primary to qualify for the general election in November, Jaeger said.

"The law is very clear," Jaeger said. The secretary of state sent a letter to Bolinske earlier this month, telling him he would not accept his nominating petitions.

State law does allow late entry into a race if there is a vacancy on the ballot, which occurs if a candidate dies, declines to run or moves away. Jaeger said that was not the case this year for North Dakota's Supreme Court and district judgeship races, all of which have at least one candidate.

Bolinske said the issue was less clear-cut. He believes if a candidate is running unopposed, that is tantamount to having a ballot vacancy. The law should promote competition for offices, he said.

"That is such a big problem in this state. For all sorts of reasons, lawyers don't run against incumbent judges," Bolinske said. "In my view, some of these judges - not all, by any means - but some of them become just little kings and queens. I don't like how they treat staff, I don't like how some of them treat attorneys."

Bolinske said he did not run in the June primary because of health difficulties, including pneumonia and pain in his left eye. "Now, I'm feeling good again," he said Friday.

Bolinske said he intends next week to submit a nominating petition. When Jaeger declines to take it, he will file a request with the North Dakota Supreme Court, asking the justices to order Jaeger to accept the petition, Bolinske said.

He sent a letter to Penny Miller, the Supreme Court's clerk, last week outlining his intentions and asking her to schedule a hearing for his case. It would be unusual for the court to hold a hearing on Bolinske's request, and Miller said the court is not obliged to have one.

"We don't schedule things on the basis of a letter," she said. "We're in a wait-and-see mode."

Two of the Supreme Court's five justices, Crothers and Mary Muehlen Maring, are running unopposed for election this fall.

Maring, who has been on the court since 1996, is seeking her second 10-year term. Crothers is running to serve the four years remaining on the term of former Justice William Neumann, who resigned in March 2005 to become director of the state Bar Association.

Hagerty is the chief administrative judge of the South Central district, which includes Burleigh, Morton and 10 other counties. Hagerty and incumbent judges David Reich, Thomas Schneider and Donald Jorgensen are all running unopposed this fall.

Bolinske has previously been active in initiative campaigns.

He was chairman of a 1996 effort that imposed new insurance requirements on privately owned trash dumps, and forbade them to take hazardous waste. At the time, a recently opened landfill near Sawyer, in southern Ward County, was taking waste from General Motors auto plants.

Voters narrowly approved the measure, but waste hauling companies challenged it in federal court, and a judge ruled it was unconstitutional. The decision was not appealed, and the law never took effect.