Reconfirmation of Federal Judges

Reconfirmation of Federal Judges
Author: United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments
Publisher:
Total Pages: 374
Release: 1973
Genre: Government publications
ISBN:

Advice and Dissent

Advice and Dissent
Author: Sarah A. Binder
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2009-12-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815703910

For better or worse, federal judges in the United States today are asked to resolve some of the nation's most important and contentious public policy issues. Although some hold onto the notion that federal judges are simply neutral arbiters of complex legal questions, the justices who serve on the Supreme Court and the judges who sit on the lower federal bench are in fact crafters of public law. In recent years, for example, the Supreme Court has bolstered the rights of immigrants, endorsed the constitutionality of school vouchers, struck down Washington D.C.'s blanket ban on handgun ownership, and most famously, determined the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. The judiciary now is an active partner in the making of public policy. Judicial selection has been contentious at numerous junctures in American history, but seldom has it seemed more acrimonious and dysfunctional than in recent years. Fewer than half of recent appellate court nominees have been confirmed, and at times over the past few years, over ten percent of the federal bench has sat vacant. Many nominations linger in the Senate for months, even years. All the while, the judiciary's caseload grows. Advice and Dissent explores the state of the nation's federal judicial selection system—a process beset by deepening partisan polarization, obstructionism, and deterioration of the practice of advice and consent. Focusing on the selection of judges for the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the U.S. District Courts, the true workhorses of the federal bench, Sarah A. Binder and Forrest Maltzman reconstruct the history and contemporary practice of advice and consent. They identify the political and institutional causes of conflict over judicial selection over the past sixty years, as well as the consequences of such battles over court appointments. Advice and Dissent offers proposals for reforming the institutions of judicial selection, advocating pragmatic reforms that seek

Confirmation Wars

Confirmation Wars
Author: Benjamin Wittes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2009
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9781442201545

Just in time for the first Supreme Court confirmation of the Obama administration, one of America's most insightful legal commentators updates the critically acclaimed Confirmation Wars: Preserving Independent Courts in Angry Times to place the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor in the context of the changing nature of judicial nominations by recent presidents. Our system has gone from one in which people like Sotomayor or recent highly qualified nominees like John Roberts and Samuel Alito are shoe-ins for confirmation to a system in which they are shoe-ins for confirmation confrontations. While rejecting parodies offered by both the Right and Left of the decline of the process by which the United States Senate confirms--or rejects--the president's nominees to the federal judiciary, Wittes explains why and how this change took place. He argues that the trade has been a bad one--offering only the crudest check on executive appointments to the judiciary and putting nominees in the most untenable and unfair situations. Published in cooperation with the Hoover Institution

Picking Federal Judges

Picking Federal Judges
Author: Sheldon Goldman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1999-09-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780300080735

How does a president choose the judges he appoints to the lower federal bench? In this analysis, a leading authority on lower federal court judicial selection tells the story of how nine presidents over a period of 56 years have chosen federal judges.