"How Different Are the Trump Judges?"

A new empirical study assesses the "quality" of Trump's judicial nominations.

A new paper by Stephen Choi and Mitu Gulati, "How Different Are the Trump Judges?" seeks to evaluate the quality of Trump's judicial appointments as compared to their colleagues on the bench. It produces some interesting results. Here's the abstract.

Donald J. Trump's presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how "his" judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking "good" judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges.  Specifically, one that would underperform compared to sets of judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as "maverick" behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges.

Some of the data Choi and Gulati compile is quite interesting, in particular some of the rankings of the most productive and most-cited judges.

Here, for instance, is the list of the most productive circuit judges, adjusted for circuit court norms.

• Michael Scudder - 7th Circuit (Trump)
• Amy St. Eve - 7th Circuit (Trump)
• Andrew Oldham - 5th Circuit (Trump)
• James Ho - 5th Circuit (Trump)
• David Barron - 1st Circuit (Obama)
• Kevin Newsom - 11th Circuit (Trump)
• Jennifer Elrod - 5th Circuit (G.W.Bush)
• Steven Menashi - 2nd Circuit (Trump)
• Stuart Duncan - 5th Circuit (Trump)
• Daniel Bress - 9th Circuit (Trump)
• Lawrence VanDyke - 9th Circuit (Trump)

And here is a list of the circuit court judges that are most cited by judges in other circuits.

• Eric Murphy - 6th Circuit (Trump)
• Amy St. Eve - 7th Circuit (Trump)
• Kevin Newsom - 11th Circuit (Trump)
• John Nalbandian - 6th Circuit (Trump)
• Cheryl Krause - 3rd Circuit (Obama)
• David Porter - 3rd Circuit (Trump)
• Chad Readler - 6th Circuit (Trump)
• Stuart Duncan - 5th Circuit (Trump)
• Britt Grant - 11th Circuit (Trump)
• James Ho - 5th Circuit (Trump)

These results may be more surprising to some than to others.

(Hat tip: Legal Theory Blog)