Once upon a time, lawyers were not the butt of jokes about greed and, well, greed. They were, instead, the Solomonic arbiters of justice, respected for their ability to put ethics, reason and the common good before all else. There are, still, some lawyers in that mold, people for whom words like "truth" and "justice" are more than empty crowd-pleasing phrases, people who are willing to work hard to see that the right thing, the just thing, occurs.

Democrat Felecia Rotellini is the class of the field. She is an experienced attorney who has skillfully handled cases on both the civil and the criminal sides - which is why her former boss, GOP Attorney General Grant Woods, has endorsed her over Horne. She's also been endorsed by the Arizona Fraternal Order of Police, the Arizona Association of REALTORS, the Professional Fire Fighters of Arizona, the Arizona Correctional Peace Officers Association and many others. With this editorial, we're adding Jewish News of Greater Phoenix to that list of endorsements.

Tom Horne, the Republican candidate for attorney general and currently the state superintendent of public instruction, has not distinguished himself in his current position. Our state's students are still at the bottom of the national educational ladder, and Horne's major achievement seems to be the controversial "Ethnic Studies Ban" bill, which he finally managed to get on Gov. Jan Brewer's desk this summer and which goes into effect in January. The local Anti-Defamation League opposed Horne's campaign against ethnic studies, leading to his resignation from that organization's board ("Horne resigns from board of ADL," Jewish News, March 5).

As for ethics, as the head of an investment firm he started in law school and which declared bankruptcy in 1970, Horne was charged with violating the federal securities law and banned by the Securities and Exchange Commission from associating with brokers, dealers, investment advisers and investment companies. Then, in reports filed with the Arizona Corporation Commission from 1997 to 2000 on behalf of his law firm, Horne denied ever having had a bankruptcy; he told The Arizona Republic that he "didn't think about it because it was 40 years ago."

More recently, Horne failed to tell the truth when he asserted that his opponent "has never tried a single case in her life." Confronted on that point in an interview by Channel 12's Brahm Resnik, Horne maintained that his statement was "99 percent" true, although azfactcheck.com shows it to be false.

Rotellini is the right woman for the job, and would be even if Horne weren't the wrong man.