federal judicial nominees

Study Suggests ABA Assessment of Judicial Nominees Biased against Women and Minorities

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

The study is here, hat tip to the Monkey Cage, a great site. I should say historically biased, since the study goes back to 1960.

The abstract:

This paper uses two new datasets to investigate the reliance by political actors on the external vetting of judicial candidates, in particular vetting conducted by the nation’s largest legal organization, the American Bar Association (ABA). First, I demonstrate that poorly rated lower-court nominees are signi cantly more likely to have their nominations fail before the Senate. However, I also show that minority and female nominees are more likely than whites and males to receive these lower ratings, even after controlling for education, experience, and partisanship via matching. Furthermore, by presenting results showing that ABA ratings are unrelated to judges’ ultimate reversal rates, I show that these scores are a poor predictor of how nominees perform once con fimed. The fi ndings in this paper complicate the ABA’s influential role in judicial nominations, both in terms of its utility in predicting judicial performance and also in terms of possible implicit biases against minority candidates, and suggest that political actors rely on these ratings perhaps for reasons unrelated to the courts.

An excerpt:

Despite attempts by Presidents and by advocacy groups, federal courts in the United States are still unreflective of the U.S. population. Of the 874 federal judges in service as of 2008, only 24% were women, 10% were African American, and 7% were Hispanic …. Fewer than 1% were Asian American and, even today, there are no federal judges who self-identify as Native American — surprising given the courts’ involvement in interpreting federal Indian laws.

 

 

Article on Age of Obama Judicial Nominees

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

From the New Republic:

David Fontana and Micah Schwartzman,  The New Republic Published: Friday, July 17, 2009

Attention was understandably focused on Sonia Sotomayor this week, as her confirmation hearings unfolded. But what about Obama’s other judicial nominees? The president has so far nominated five judges to federal circuit courts. On average, these nominees are 55 years old, more than a decade older than Sotomayor was when she was nominated to the Second Circuit. (She was 43.) For years, Republicans have been nominating sharp young conservatives to the lower federal courts. Now, rather than looking for young legal talent of its own, a Democratic administration seems to be favoring older nominees. In our view, this is a major mistake.

The obvious reason is that federal judges, like Supreme Court justices, have life tenure–which means that younger judges serve longer on the bench and, all else being equal, have more influence over the law. (And the influence of circuit-court judges is considerable: Although the Supreme Court may be the last word on major constitutional issues, the lower courts matter just as much, if not more, in the administration of the law. This past year, the Supreme Court decided 83 cases, while the federal circuit courts disposed of 61,104.)

Continue reading →