Obama’s Judicial Legacy: The Final Chapter (original) (raw)
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A retrospective on Obama’s judges: diversity, intersectionality, and symbolic representation
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The Forum, 2009
This essay speculates on what an Obama judiciary might look like and how the selection process is likely to play out. This is presented against the backdrop of past experience. First, the essay traces the demographic diversification of the federal bench from the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt through George W. Bush. Second, this essay considers ideological diversity and presents voting data from the first three completed terms of the Roberts Court. Third, the essay considers the selection process, including confirmation of lower-court judges by the Senate. It concludes that President Obama can be expected to promote further gender, race, and ethnic diversification as well as to seek to moderate the current ideological imbalance on the courts. He will likely keep the existing institutional apparatus of judicial selection and will restore the American Bar Association to the role it had prior to George W. Bush's presidency. Confirmation may well prove to be a challenge in a Senate that is not filibuster-proof.
Law & Social Inquiry, 2021
Nominations to the US Supreme Court have become increasingly important and contentious in America politics in recent decades. Reasons include the growing significance of constitutional law to the prospects of political power, accompanied by historical developments in the relative power of the competing party coalitions that have placed even more focus on the composition of the Court. Meanwhile, partisan conflict and stalemate have grown in the party systems and among We the People. In The Long Reach of the Sixties, Laura Kalman explores how the nomination struggles of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon set the stage for the contemporary conflict besetting nominations and American politics more generally. Building on Kalman’s book, this review essay discusses the political and jurisprudential causes and implications of this conflict, with an eye toward what might lie ahead.
Assessing President Obama's Appointment of Women to the Federal Appellate Courts
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A major legacy of the Obama presidency was the mark he left on the federal courts with respect to increasing judicial diversity. In particular, President Obama's appointments of women to the federal judiciary exceeded all previous presidents in terms of both absolute numbers and as a share of all judges; he also appointed a record-setting number of women of color to the lower federal courts. In this Article, I take an intersectional approach to exploring variation in the professional backgrounds, qualifications, and Senate confirmation experiences of Obama's female appeals court appointees, comparing them with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton appointees. These data reveal that women of color appointed by Obama differ from both white women and minority men in terms of ABA ratings, the types of professional experiences they bring with them, and whether they were confirmed by a roll call vote.
Picking Federal Judges: A Mysterious Alchemy
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Each filling of a judicial vacancy is a minidrama of individual ambi tions, backstage maneuverings, mobilization of support, and occa sional double-dealing, and is affected by the values of those involved in the process. There is human drama as political forces, events and personalities intersect. And the end result is the staffing of the third branch of government, which by its actions-or inactions-has a profound effect on American lives. [p. 365; footnote omitted] With these words, Professor Goldman1 concludes the lesson he be gan nine chapters earlier as he embarked on his exploration of the seldom-mapped territory where the American government sets about building that smallest part of itself that has the most day-to day continual contact with the American people. But I would hope that the readers of this review and of this book would keep that simple lesson uppermost in Inind as they consider Sheldon Goldman's unique contribution to our understanding of ourselves.
Judicial Selection: Politics, Biases, and Constituency Demands
Public Choice, 2004
The determinants of recent U.S. district court judges and appellate court judges selection have been subject of much debate, but little systematic evidence has been presented to substantiate claims regarding discrimination against particular groups of judicial nominees, nor regarding the length of the appointment process. We study both the length of the nominations process, and the likelihood of confirmation and emphasize the role of Senatorial seniority and agenda control in the confirmations process. We find that Senators with agenda control have a positive effect on the speed and likelihood of confirmation and that nominees from states with comparatively senior Senators receive expedited treatment relative to other nominees. Although politics matter in the confirmation process, Senators are responsive to perceived "shortage" of judges, since they fill seats faster when a relatively large number of court seats are vacant. Nominees with higher personal qualifications are also more likely to experience success in confirmations. We found no evidence of gender or race discrimination on the part of the Senate.