American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary - A Contemporary Assessment, Part 1

• NCJ Number: 88103
• Journal: Judicature Volume: 66 Issue: 8 Dated: (March 1983) Pages: 348-362
• Author(s): E E Slotnick
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 15 pages
• Publication Format: Article
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article examines how the American Bar Association (ABA) Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary responded to changes in the judicial selection environment, aspects of the committee's decisional processes, and the committee's role in the contemporary Federal judicial selection processes.

Abstract

The Omnibus Judgeship Act of 1978 created an unprecedented workload for the ABA committee by creating 152 judgeship vacancies at one time, while the committee typically evaluates about 40 potential lower Federal court nominees in a year. The committee handled this demand by working overtime rather than expanding committee membership and by only evaluating the one candidate the President favored for each judgeship. Perhaps the most fundamental change in the selection environment in recent years was the proliferation of nominating commissions from 1977 to 1980 to aid President Carter and U.S. senators in designating nominees for Federal judgeships. This has tended to change the committee role from that of a screening commission to a committee that investigates those selected by the nominating commissions. The representativeness of the committee has been questioned in a time when affirmative action has been emphasized in judicial selections. Because the membership of the committee is unpaid, most come from large firms where their work is absorbed and pay continued, yielding a committee of predominantly white males. Although the decision process appears simple and well institutionalized, issues requiring further consideration include the actual voting mechanisms used, possible switching in the ABA's ratings of nominees, and the safeguards adopted to deal with the problems of an investigation generally dominated by a single investigator. While the ABA has no official veto in the nominating process and claims it does not want such power, its rankings do have a strong influence on the selection process. It makes sense to evaluate the performance of Federal judges to determine the accuracy of the ABA rankings of those judges at the time of their selection so as to assess the committee's performance. Thirty footnotes are listed.