Legal News

Is ABA Biased Against Conservative Judicial Nominees? A Study Says Yes

By Ashby Jones

It’s been a long-simmering gripe, that the ABA — the American Bar Association, not the old American Basketball Association that featured Dr. J (pictured) and other masters of the hard court — is biased against more conservative judicial nominees.

According to a group of academics, political scientists Richard Vining of the University of Georgia, Amy Steigerwalt of Georgia State University and Susan Smelcer, an Emory University doctoral candidate, the allegations have some merit. The trio has completed a study to be unveiled next month which concludes that the ABA’s evaluations of judicial candidates prior to their nominations are biased against more right-leaning candidates. Click here for the story, from the National Law Journal’s Marcia Coyle.

Some of the findings, according to the NLJ:

• Nominees appointed by Democratic presidents are more likely to receive higher ABA ratings than nominees appointed by Republican presidents.

• The more conservative the nominee, the less likely he or she will receive a high ABA rating.

• White nominees are more likely to get higher ratings than minority nominees.

The findings dovetail with the recent announcement that the ABA will resume its role of evaluating candidates before their nominations. The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary had evaluated prospective nominees for every president from 1952 through 2000. In 2001, the Bush administration announced it would break with that tradition and no longer submit names in advance of nominations, leaving the ABA out in the cold. The break with tradition was the result of increasing criticism by conservative groups and Republican senators who claimed bias. Click here for a recent LB post on the ABA and its nominee process.

The ABA was not immediately available for comment on the study, but ABA President H. Thomas Wells recently insisted that ideology plays no part in the evaluation process.

“The Standing Committee does not consider a potential nominee’s ideological or political philosophy,” he said. “Its work is fully insulated from, and completely independent of, all other activities of the ABA, and is not influenced by ABA policies. The Standing Committee itself never proposes or endorses a particular candidate for the federal judiciary; its sole function is to assist the administration and the Senate in evaluating the professional qualifications of potential nominees for a life-time appointment to the federal bench.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 18, 2009 (boomark / email).