Only The Powerful Need Apply

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Just ran across the following article from the Alliance for Justice (yes, they’re lawyers, but they’re the good guys - like me!) about the double standards being applied to federal court nominees by the Republican-controlled Senate. You see, if you’re a prosecutor, you’re OK. If you’re a corporate attorney, you’re fine. But if you’re a public defender or a civil rights attorney or God forbid, a plaintiffs’ trial lawyer, then you by definition have an “agenda” that must be kept from the federal bench or at a minimum be scrutinized in excruciating detail.

At Wednesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Republican Senator Jeff Sessions provided a model lesson in why there is so little professional diversity among our federal judges. Turning to District of Maryland nominee Paula Xinis, Sessions unleashed a line of accusatory questions suggesting that Xinis’ career as a public defender and civil rights lawyer showed an “agenda” that she would invariably “bring to the bench.” The questions were absurd and unfounded, but they could not be dismissed as such. Instead, Xinis had to patiently explain that protecting the rights of America’s most vulnerable and disenfranchised had not left her tainted with disqualifying bias.

This was for a position on the federal bench right here in Maryland, folks. And getting interrogated by Jeff Sessions, one of the most odious of all senators and a man who was rejected many years ago for an appellate court position because of his segregationist past, is particularly rich in irony. 

But the problem isn’t limited to just this nomination, it’s very widespread.

Public defenders and civil rights lawyers (as well as plaintiffs’ lawyers generally) are dramatically underrepresented among federal judges. Just 14 percent of President Obama’s judicial nominees have been public defenders, while about 41 percent have been prosecutors. Likewise, only 3.2 percent of nominees have worked as civil rights lawyers, while 72 percent have been corporate attorneys. Xinis’ nomination reflects continued improvement—already in 2015 the president has nominated four public defenders (out of 12 total nominations), and Rhode Island’s senators recently recommended a potential fifth public defender for nomination—yet the wide disparity remains.

Beyond specific categories of law practice, these numbers reveal a broader truth: our federal courts are staffed largely with judges who, in their legal careers before taking the bench, represented only the most powerful in American society, either defending massive corporations or wielding the enormous power of the state against criminal defendants. Only a small minority of judges have experience representing indigent defendants or other low-income clients, the very people who depend most on our courts to provide equal justice.

In part, this is due to the mistaken but rarely questioned notion that lawyering to preserve influence and privilege—to cement rather than challenge the status quo through legal practice—is somehow impartial and cannot possibly come to bear in judicial decisionmaking. In a recent panel discussion led by Alliance for Justice, D.C. Circuit Judge Nina Pillard noted how “[t]here’s a sense, somehow, in the process of finding judges or candidates, that being in a large corporate law firm is neutral and being an advocate for people who have been subject to discrimination or retaliation or repression of their speech or their religious beliefs is not neutral, and . . . I would question that.”

When federal judges only represent the point of view of the privileged, guess who’s more likely to win? Until we have as much diversity in our courts as we do in our society, we’re never going to get real fairness in our courts.

Professional diversity in the judiciary matters. Judge Pillard called it “a deficit in our courts” that “we haven’t had [judges] who’ve represented less well-to-do, less institutionally-established clients[.]” And the point isn’t that one kind of lawyer is neutral and impartial while another kind of lawyer is not. Nor is it that corporate lawyers are necessarily bad judges and public defenders are necessarily good. It’s that all judges, regardless of background, are shaped by the perspectives and experiences acquired over many years in the law. Fair and equal courts require a diversity of these perspectives, not any one in particular, and this week’s hearing reminds us of how hard that is to achieve.

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