Turtle Talk

Please check out Against Generalist Judges on SSRN (also available on the Stanford Law Review website).

Here is the “abstract”:

This essay offers yet another proposal for Supreme Court reform. My proposal is rooted in a preference for subject matter expertise in judging. Drawing from arbitration practice, I propose a system in which the parties to federal court litigation — from federal district court all the way to the Supreme Court — negotiate and choose judges from a pool of subject matter experts. The pool would consist of Article III judges who develop subject matter expertise in a given field, say, intellectual property or federal Indian law, and who are available to hear cases over which they are experts, not generalists. Although seemingly radical, there are already formal and informal models for this structure, namely the Federal Circuit, the D.C. Circuit, state courts of criminal appeals, tribal courts, and of course arbitration itself.