U.S. District Court Judge Kathryn Mizelle struck down the mask mandate this week for domestic travel, bringing polarized reactions from the right and left sides of the political spectrum. Since two of the main talking points surrounding Judge Mizelle seem to be her age (35) and her ABA qualification rating (Not Qualified) it seemed apropos…
Category: Nominations
What to Expect from Justice Breyer’s Retirement and Judge Jackson’s (Presumptive) Confirmation to the Court
Now that Senator Manchin declared he will vote to confirm Judge Jackson to the Supreme Court, Jackson’s confirmation in a week or so is all but a foregone conclusion. Will Jackson usher in a new era of judging on the Court? This outcome is very unlikely. The Court now has six conservative, republican nominated justices…
Just the Stats: Ketanji Brown Jackson as a District Court Judge
This post has a bevy of statistics related to Judge Jackson’s decisions as a judge on the District Court for the District of Columbia, which helps paint a picture of the cases Judge Jackson decided, the people involved, and how her decisions fared on appeal. Some aggregate statistics and other information on Judge Jackson’s background…
Ketanji Brown Jackson Decision Dataset
President Biden has a major decision to make with who to nominate to fill Justice Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court. One of the top contenders for the nomination is Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson from the D.C. Circuit. Judge Jackson worked as an attorney in private practice, an assistant special counsel to the United States…
Judge Amy Coney Barrett Case Dataset
The 622 decisions listed below comprise the set of opinions Judge Barrett’s name is listed on during her stint on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Scroll to the right in the dataset to view all of the variables. The variables that may need some additional information include: Vote: What was Barrett’s vote in the…
Judicial Nominee Whisperer
I’m going to take this opportunity to say that understanding a bit about Trump’s nomination strategy goes a long way to understanding who he will select to the Supreme Court. Applying various methods across three articles I predicted each pick well in advance of the nominations; in fact, in increasing time lengths from the nominations as well.
Changes to the Federal Courts: Trump’s Most Significant and Lasting Legacy
The current presidency has been one of the biggest political roller coasters of modern times. Terms like “emoluments” that have not been bandied about in several hundreds of years have become verbatim. Seldom is there a time when the cover story in any major news media does not involve President Trump. While calls for impeachment…
Will Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Hearings Provide Any Useful Information?
Supreme Court nominees’ confirmation hearings involve much dialogue between the nominees and senators. In two chaotic days of hearings for Judge Kavanaugh, we have seen a full spectrum of behavior from both sides of the aisle. Showboating aside, this is a genuinely important hearing for a crucial seat on the Court and hence emotions are running…
Without a Swing It’s Game Over for Democrats
The Democrats are in a precarious position in the latest battle for a seat on the Supreme Court. Many Democrats oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination and will not vote to confirm him. Others are requesting that the Senate hold off on voting on Kavanaugh’s confirmation until the National Archives produces the record setting million or so pages…
The Big Business Court
The current Supreme Court is unabashedly friendly towards big business. How friendly? If the Court’s trajectory continues, perhaps as friendly as any Court dating back to the Lochner-era where laissez-faire policies exuded from the Court’s rulings. Prominent scholars, most notably Epstein, Landes, and Posner found empirical support for the proposition that the current Court is more pro-business…
The Five Frontrunners
With less than one week left until President Trump announces his nominee to fill the second SCOTUS vacancy since he took office, not all names are getting equal attention. President Trump indicated the other day that he narrowed down his initial list to five finalists. While all members on this whittled down list are not known, a few judges…
Analyzing News Coverage of Merrick Garland’s Nomination
(image from NPR) With the help of a nifty tool piece of software that performs topic modeling, I distilled some of the major themes that appeared in national and local news covering the Garland nomination in print and online (this include several articles from some of the most widely read papers, e.g. New York Times…
empiricalscotus.com 