Rorie Spill Solberg

Communicating to the Courts and Beyond: Why Members of Congress Participate as Amici Curiae

Members of Congress engage in discretionary behaviors, such as making speeches and cosponsoring bills, which are generally motivated by either electoral needs or policy preferences. We examine a discretionary behavior that engages the judicial branch in the conversation: the participation of members of Congress as amici curiae before the Supreme Court. Amicus curiae briefs provide members of Congress with a direct avenue of communication with the judiciary, and this characteristic suggests that cosigning would be a method of creating good public policy. Using data from the 1980�97 terms of the Supreme Court, however, we find that members of Congress cosign onto amicus curiae briefs as a means of �taking stances,� akin to cosponsoring a bill. The action allows the member to speak indirectly to an audience beyond these governmental institutions. Evidence shows that ideological extremism and committee jurisdiction promote participation as amicus curiae.

Diversifying the Federal Bench: Presidential Patterns

In this study of all federal district court appointments from 1977 through 2004, we examine a variety of possible influences on the selection of women and minorities to the federal bench. We find that women and minorities are more likely to be appointed to relatively large courts and to courts that have relatively few female or minority judges. The pool of eligible candidates also has a substantial and significant influence on the likelihood that a minority judge will be appointed. We find that political factors such as state ideology or the partisan composition of the U.S Senate delegation from the state have little influence. We conclude that presidents take race and gender into consideration when making judicial appointments and are particularly interested in diversifying relatively homogeneous courts; moreover, large courts may offer an opportunity to diversify with relatively few trade-offs in representation of other groups or interests.

A retrospective on Obama’s judges: diversity, intersectionality, and symbolic representation*

ABSTRACT Despite abundant attention to the judicial selection of U.S. Supreme Court justices, most federal legal disputes are resolved in the lower federal courts. Who the judges are and how they make their decisions matters enormously in a democracy that values the fair and equitable treatment of its citizens under the rule of law. Our focus in this study is on the demographic diversity of President Obama’s appointments to the lower federal bench. It is clear from the various methods of examining the numbers that Obama valued diversity – perhaps more so than any previous president. When we examine all lower courts in the aggregate, and then district and circuit courts separately, the total number of successful nominees, the replacement patterns for departing judges, and comparisons between active and senior status judges, we see a concerted and largely successful effort to increase symbolic representation on the federal judiciary. Under different political circumstances, the data would lead us to consider novel complexities in diversifying the federal bench in the next several years. But a Trump presidency and its expected focus on ideology over diversity is likely to lead the study of judicial selection in a different direction, at least for the time being.