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This is part 1 of a two-part series detailing the selection and confirmation processes of lower federal court judges during President Obama’s first 6 years. Our attention in part 1 is on Obama’s lower federal court appointments during the 113th Congress, specifically on the selection processes. We then examine the backgrounds and attributes of those confirmed during the 113th, looking at the appointees to the district and appeals courts separately. Confirmation processes are the main focus of part 2 of our study, where we discuss the lead-up to the nuclear option, the “fallout” from its invocation, and the renewed emphasis on the Blue Slip system as a tool of the minority party in the Senate. We conclude by taking a deeper look at the administration’s historic contribution to enhancing diversity on the federal bench across the district and circuit courts and, as well, make a similar assessment of the impact of the Obama appointments on the partisan makeup of the federal bench on the district courts and across the appellate circuits.
This article looks at the appointment and confirmation politics of President Obama’s nominees during the 114th Congress in which unprecedented obstruction and delay of Obama's nominees including the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland occurred. This is placed within the overall context of Obama’s impact on the judiciary. The demographic portrait of the Obama judiciary is sketched with special attention to the historic record of diverse nontraditional appointees. We conclude with a look at what lies ahead with the Trump administration and judicial appointments/confirmation.
Building on the empirical portrait of federal judicial selection processes and outcomes in the 113th Congress published in part 1, we now turn to in-depth analyses, drawing on extensive interview data, of the confirmation battle over confirmations to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, filibuster reform (the nuclear option) and its consequences, the role of the blue slip system in contemporary judicial selection, case studies of selection successes and failures, and the historic impact of the Obama appointments record on patterns of diversity and partisanship on the federal bench.
It is a pleasure to review this well-written book, which should be of enormous interest to every serious student of judicial politics and the presidency. Based upon a thorough mining of the presidential papers of seven presidents and numerous interviews with key participants in the selection process, along with other primary and secondary sources, Yalof gives us a presidency-by-presidency take on the recruitment of Supreme Court nominees.
Senate confirmation battles over presidential nominees to the federal courts often provide drama for a congressional session. This is especially true when the president has the opportunity to make appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation's highest and most prestigious tribunal. President Bill Clinton twice had this opportunity during his first term, but neither nomination supplied much drama. President Clinton chose Ruth Bader Ginsburg to replace Justice Byron White in 1993, and the Senate confirmed her appointment by a vote of 96 to 3. And President Clinton nominated Stephen Breyer to replace Justice Harry Blackmun in 1994, which was confirmed by the Senate by a vote of 87 to 9. Although Supreme Court nominations get more headlines, lower-court appointments may have a larger impact on the judicial system. These nominations rarely produce drama on the public stage, but drama often occurs behind the scenes. This was especially the case in the 104th Congress, when the Senate decided not to go along with the usual script. Many judicial nominations were stalled in the Judiciary Committee, and some never reached the Senate floor. In this chapter, we analyze that unusual play of forces.
The federal judicial selection process represents a rare interface in American politics where all three branches of government are brought, sometimes sharply, into focus at the same time. Vacancies in the federal judiciary, particularly those on the Supreme Court, have, in recent years, tended to foster more discussion and debate over the role of courts in the American polity than anything save for the most controversial and emotionally laden Supreme Court rulings.
This article examines the business of three United States Courts of Appeals over the course of their history. The courts selected for study were the northeastern Second Circuit, the deep south Fifth Circuit, and the west coast Ninth Circuit. A random sample of 50 cases was drawn for each circuit for every fifth fiscal year beginning with 1895 and ending with 1975. The sample years were aggregated into four time periods: 1895-1910, 1915-1930, 1935-1955, and 1960-1975. The business of the three circuits was found to have changed substantially from the 1895-1910 time period to the modern period. In the earlier years the circuits had small proportions of criminal cases—with the exception of the Second Circuit—a significant portion of real property cases, substantial proportions of business cases, and significant proportions of tort cases. By the 1960-1975 period a sizable proportion of the business of all three circuits was devoted to criminal and other public-law type cases; there were negligible proportions of real property cases, relatively small proportions of business cases, and even smaller proportions of tort cases. Public disputes replaced private disputes as the major source of the courts' business, and over time there has been a convergence among the circuits in the mix of cases coming to them.
In an earlier study of voting behavior of U.S. appeals courts judges, attitudinal patterns were investigated along with an analysis of the relationship of judges' backgrounds to their decisions. In this revisit, the earlier findings were treated as hypotheses and tested with a new case population covering a subsequent and longer time period. In all, 2,115 cases decided nonunanimously were coded on one or more issues. Most cases could be classified under ten broad issue categories which were then utilized for most of the analyses. Although the research design was similar to that of the earlier study, a wider variety of methods was employed including nonparametric and parametric intercorrelations of voting behavior on the ten issues and stepwise multiple regression and partial correla-tion analyses of seven background variables and their relationships to voting behavior on the issues. The principal findings were similar to those found earlier but it was possible to map voting behavior with some-what more precision and to uncover some unexpected relationships such as those concerning the potency of the age variable particularly for voting on political liberalism issues.
It has been of some interest to students of federal judicial politics to examine the social and political characteristics of those who become judges and the recruitment patterns of different presidential administrations. The aim of this note is to present some findings relevant for such purposes and to focus on some socio-political characteristics of the Johnson and Nixon (through 1971) appointees to life-tenured positions on the United States district and appeals courts.
Voting behavior of public decision-makers has been of central concern for political scientists. For example, studies of legislatures (notably of Congress) have investigated such research problems as: (1) the extent to which voting on one issue is related to voting on other issues; (2) the potency of party affiliation as an organizer of attitudes and a predictor of voting behavior; and (3) the relationship of demographic characteristics to voting behavior. These and related concerns have more recently occupied the attention of students of the judiciary whose focus has primarily been on the United States Supreme Court. State courts of last resort have also provided a testing ground primarily for problems (2) and (3). However, the United States courts of appeals, second only to the Supreme Court in judicial importance, have been largely neglected. This paper considers the above research problems with reference to the voting behavior on all eleven courts of appeals from July 1, 1961 through June 30, 1964.
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