NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Aug. 7, 2001

Slightly more than a month into his term, President Bush ended the ABA's longtime role of screening potential federal judges before nominations are sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

James Lindgren, a legal scholar with an interest in legal empiricism, said his study found 65 percent of Bill Clinton's nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals who had no judicial experience received "unanimously well-qualified," the ABA's highest rating, while just 17 percent of Bush's appointees without judicial experience received the group's highest rating.

The study found Bush appointees with good credentials - a top 10 law school education, law review experience and a federal court clerkship - at a 32 percent probability of receiving the highest ABA rating compared to 48 percent for a Clinton appointee.

"This is not a simple story of apparent ABA bias toward Clinton nominees," Lindgren said. "The patterns are more complex than that."

Lingren examined the credentials of 108 judges who were confirmed to the federal appellate bench under Clinton and Bush. He said among nominees without prior judicial experience, there was a clear preference for the Clinton appointees.

"Controlling for credentials, Clinton nominees have more than 10 times better odds of getting a unanimous well-qualified rating than similarly credentialed Bush appointees, Lengren wrote. "Just being nominated by Clinton instead of Bush is a stronger positive variable than any other credential or than all other credentials put together.

"The process for Bush nominees was substantially objective," he wrote. "The process for Clinton nominees was almost entirely subjective."

The data in the study was collected by "ABA Watch" and will be published in the October 2001 issue of the Journal of Law and Politics, published at the University of Virginia and funded by the university and Northwestern law school and its Searle Fund for faculty research.

The study concluded there was no statistically significant difference in the ABA ratings of Clinton and Bush appointees who did have judicial experience.

The ABA said a vetting committee had screened and evaluated 17 of Bush's first 44 federal trial and appeals court nominees and had rated them all either "qualified" or "well-qualified."

Though he had not seen the study, ABA President-elect Robert Hirshon said the ABA's own "analysis" had found no bias in the judicial ratings.

"I do know this. If you take a look at all of the recommendations since the 1960s, and we did that, and we have the data available - we took that and said, 'Is there a political bias?' And what we found is of the 26 nominees that had received unfavorable ratings 23 of those nominees were suggested by Democratic presidents and only three by Republican presidents," Hirshon said. "I just don't see a bias."

About 535 delegates to the ABA House of Delegates are meeting at the association's annual midyear gathering.

Copyright 2001 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration

Media Bias

A product that might interest you:
Find out the truth about communists in America