Persistent general public complaints about Trump's Art.III judicial picks include that they are "unqualified" and were drawn from an unduly narrow pool of traditionally plausible candidates. Of course, and as they say, "where data are scant, 'opinions' bloom." In a recent recent paper, How Different Are the Trump Judges, Stephen Choi (NYU) & Mitu Gulati (UVa) bring some initial data to these prevailing conventional wisdoms. The paper sets out to examine how Trump-appointed judges "have done compared to other presidents' appointments." Their findings challenge prevailing and widely-held assumptions.
The paper includes all active circuit court judges between January 1, 2020, through June 30, 2023. While the analyses are largely descriptive, the paper explores judge performance in terms of three key metrics: productivity, influence, and the degree to which a judge is willing to "deviate" from other judges, and particularly from "those closest to them in terms of political ideology." As the paper's abstract (below) implies, and contrary to public predictions of underperformance, the authors find that "Trump judges outperform other judges."
"Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how 'his' judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking 'good' judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges that underperform compared to judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as “maverick” behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges."
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