Do they know them when they see them? : the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary and qualifications for the federal bench

Author / Creator

Sieja, James Allen, dissertant

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Online

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Summary

Recent work on the federal nominations process finds a systematic relationship between nominee characteristics and their ratings from the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federa...

Recent work on the federal nominations process finds a systematic relationship between nominee characteristics and their ratings from the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary (SCFJ). While these findings are substantively interesting, the mechanism behind them is not clear. The first chapter demonstrates that the individual investigator is the most important factor in determining a nominee's final ABA rating. It also shows that the committee composition can affect individual behavior in specific contexts. The data support the finding of pure partisan bias best, but they cannot rule out possible homophilic bias. I combine new data on all SCFJ members from 1958 to 2013 with all nominations to the courts of appeals over the same period to give a more complete picture of ABA ratings. The second chapter creates a valid and reliable new measure for the qualifications of nominees to courts of appeals. Though widely-used in studies of judicial politics, ABA ratings have a well-established bias: Controlling for a number of objective indicators of nominee quality, partisanship remains a significant predictor of a nominee's final rating. I empirically test the new measure in two examples against ABA ratings to demonstrate both its potential and its possible drawbacks. The American Bar Association's involvement in the judicial selection process grows out of a unique relationship between its SCFJ, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC). The SCFJ's central function is to solve a collective dilemma, the production of information, for its two principals. Supported by a qualitative assessment of the secondary literature on the SCFJ, archival sources, and congressional hearing transcripts, the third chapter argues that the private nature of the SCFJ complicates the relationship between the governmental principals and their SCFJ agent, such as the inability of the Senate to use its most powerful monitoring tool: binding legislation. I conclude with a discussion of the SCFJ's role in light of the classical views on interest group pluralism.

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