As the state scrambles to put in place a new system to select its trial court judges, Mayor Bloomberg is advocating a middle road, rejecting calls for primary elections in judicial races and endorsing a modification to the existing judicial nominating conventions.

On Friday, the city’s corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, announced that he and Mayor Bloomberg support the creation of independent panels to rate judicial candidates. Because the ultimate power for nominating judicial candidates would remain with party conventions, the plan drew criticism from lawyers who worry the proposal would leave party leaders in control of selecting judicial candidates.

The issue of judicial selection came to the forefront of state politics this year when a federal judge declared unconstitutional the decades-old conventions that parties held annually to nominate judicial candidates, saying they gave too much power to party leaders.

“There is a judicial selection crisis in this state,” Mr. Cardozo said, according to a transcript of a speech delivered Friday at New York Law School. “The system has not only been found unconstitutional, but it is producing candidates who are clearly not the most highly qualified.”

Saying judges should not be required to go through an open primary election and acknowledging certain restrictions in the state constitution, Mr. Cardozo said: “The only other alternative that I see is to correct the flaws in the judicial convention nominating system.

“We can do this by enacting a law requiring an independent judicial qualification committee to tell the convention who the three most qualified candidates are for each vacancy,” he said.

Mr. Bloomberg has in the past indicated that he supports the creation of independent judicial qualification committees, an idea the state’s highest judge, Chief Judge Judith Kaye, endorsed in her State of the Judiciary address in February.

The state Senate and the Assembly have in recent months been going in different directions on how New Yorkers ought to choose state Supreme Court judges.

Supporters of independent reviewing panels say they will pressure party conventions to choose from only a qualified pool of candidates. Some critics of the proposal of Messrs. Bloomberg and Cardozo advocate scrapping the judicial nominating convention system. They say only election primaries can ensure that party leaders do not choose judges.

“While screening panels may make some difference on the margins in terms of weeding out the most unqualified candidates, they do absolutely nothing to eliminate the true problem with the current system – namely, that the local party leaders control the ultimate selection of Supreme Court justices,” a lawyer who is involved in the lawsuit that prompted a federal judge to rule that the nominating conventions were unconstitutional, Jeremy Creelan, said.