First of all, many thanks to Jeff and Andy for inviting me to guest blog this summer at Voir Dire.  My primary interests are in elections and American government broadly, but the ongoing controversy surrounding judicial elections, along with the encouragement of friends & collaborators, continues to pull me further into the study of judicial politics.

Some of my recent projects have led me to wonder exactly what values one should seek to promote in a campaign finance system.  I’m interested in your thoughts, but let me throw out two: preventing corruption and promoting the spread of information.

Corruption is a natural concern with campaign finance.  While there are clear examples (think Duke Cunningham and William Jefferson), the evidence for general corruption is limited.  A possibility of bias, however, remains (perhaps particularly important given the “probability of bias” standard invoked in the Massey case Chris Bonneau explicated earlier on Voir Dire).

On the other hand, spending money seems to be a necessity for disseminating electoral information to the public.  The fast food industry spends about $4 billion each year to make sure we’re well informed about the virtues of burgers and fries; this is about twice the amount spent on the 2008 presidential election.  Shouldn’t we know at least as much about candidates for the president as we know about the latest burger or the new McCafe?  What’s more, Coleman and Manna (2000) show that higher campaign spending serves to inform voters, enabling them to make better decisions.  Hall and Bonneau (2008) show that increased campaign spending leads to higher rates of voter participation in judicial elections that are oftentimes otherwise low-turnout affairs.  In this sense, restricting campaign spending may prevent elections from accomplishing their key goal: enabling citizens to make informed decisions between a set of candidates and the policies they are likely to pursue.

As I think about how to balance the two, I’m struck by two things.  First, neither value explicitly limits the amount of campaign spending, as long as funds are acquired in a way that limits the possibility of bias.  As such, individuals who have expressed discomfort with Obama’s (and previously Bush’s) prolific fundraising, are objecting to the amount of money spent in politics, which is not necessarily problematic in terms of these values (so on what basis might it be problematic?).  Second, if one is balancing a possibility of bias against the certainty of the democratic goods that come with campaign, how strong must the possibility of bias be to justify more strict campaign finance regulations?

The American Bar Association Standing Committee on the Judiciary has unanimously rated Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor “well qualified”—the highest rating a nominee can receive. As a District Court nominee, a “substantial majority” of the panel gave her a “qualified” rating, while a minority rated her “well qualified.” As a Court of Appeals nominee, she received a “well qualified” rating from a “substantial majority” of the panel, while a minority of the panel rated her “qualified.”

… in Esquire magazine. A sample below the fold.

ESQUIRE:Your book really lays everything out in a very simple, clear way. It’s obvious this is something you’ve been thinking about for a long time.

HOWARD DEAN:It was one of the reasons I ran for president.

ESQ:One thing I’ve never seen before is when you say, “Much is made of the 47 million without insurance, but nothing of the 25 million who have insurance but don’t go and see the doctor.” I’ve got one of those high-deductible catastrophic plans myself, so I don’t go to the doctor unless I’m bleeding. Why have I never seen this argument before?

HD:Because 99 percent of the discussions among reporters, policy wonks, and politicians focus on the uninsured — which is, frankly, why nothing is passed. They don’t focus on the majority of Americans who have health insurance that doesn’t work.

ESQ:Boil it down, if you would. Why isn’t it working even if you do have insurance?

HD:Because it’s too expensive. The private sector can’t manage costs. Health care is one of the few places — defense is another — that the government works more efficiently and more effectively than the private sector. That’s just a fact.

ESQ:Why is that?

HD:Because there is no feedback in the private health-care system. When I was practicing medicine, nobody with substernal chest pain ever got off my examining table and said, “The guy down the street does it for $2,000 cheaper, I’ll see you later.” That’s why we’ve had 40 years of costs that increase between two and three times the rate of inflationevery single year. It’s breaking our economic system. People are yelling and screaming about jobs going to China, but they’re not yelling and screaming about jobs going to Canada. But they are. Because the right-wingers can scream and yell about rationing if they want, but economically their system works much better than ours does.

ESQ:I’ve seen nothing about that during this debate. But in the book you talk about GM and — or was it Toyota? — moving their new factories just across the bridge to Ontario to take advantage of the Canadian health-care system.

HD:Toyota did also, but GM and Ford were the big ones.

ESQ:It seems pretty obvious. They save money. So why are businesses so completely resistant to this?

HD:They’re not. Some businesses — and the Chamber of Commerce — are resistant because they’re ideological. They are part of the right wing. Then there are lots of businesses that aren’t particularly ideological but genuinely believe that if they keep doing the same thing, they’ll somehow get a different outcome. That’s human nature. They think they can manage health-care costs even though it’s been 40 years since any of them ever have. That’s why I think Obama’s plan is so great: If you like what you have, you can keep it.

One of the things I (and I am sure others) struggle with is keeping up with the current literature.  Even in a field that seems small (like Law and Courts) there are dozens (if not more) new articles every year that are of interest.  Between producing my own stuff, teaching, administrative responsibilities, baseball games, trips to the dog park, etc., I find it a challenge to keep up.  Moreover, because I teach a graduate seminar every other year, I need to stay somewhat current so I can incorporate the most recent interesting literature into my seminar.

I have tried to solve this by scanning certain journals every 3 months and reading every article on judicial politics in those journals.  The journals I look at are:  APSR, AJPS, JOP, PRQ, APR, SSQ, BJPS, LSR, JLEO, JELS, Political Behavior, Public Choice, QJPS, and Judicature.  Some of these are more useful than others.  (I rarely find anything in BJPS or Public Choice.)  I also only read empirical articles about judicial politics–relatively broadly defined.  I am sure I miss some good article by limiting my scope to only these journals.  And I do not read law reviews at all, unless there is an article specifically brought to my attention.  But I think I get MOST of the good scholarship out there via this search method.  As for books…that is a lot harder.  Both in terms of time and cost (to me and the students), I tend to prefer articles to books (though I do try to read those I find interesting).

So…all of this is a preface to a question:  How are others able to stay current?  What strategies do you use?

Over the past few days, there has been an interesting (?) discussion on the Law and Courts Listserv over the nature of judicial qualifications.  Specifically, the issue seems to boil down to whether or not the executive (or judicial nominating commission) should recommend/nominate the “most qualified” individual or a person/slate of people who are all qualified, but also may diversify the bench somehow (demographically, experience, etc.)

It seems to me that anyone arguing for a “most qualified” person needs to first come up with a workable operationalization of that concept.  And I (for one) have yet to see such a concept.  Moreover, even if one were to come up with such an operationalization, it is not clear to me that we ought to be appointing judges in such a manner.  If we think about hiring committees in academia, qualifications are important, but much more important is the “fit” of the candidate.  The same is true is the private sector as well–while one candidate may seemingly rise to the top on paper, how the candidate fites with the mission of the company is just as (if not more) important.  Indeed, this is why candidates interview for jobs and not just simply send in their resumes.

Applying this to the judicial realm, a candidate must first, of course, be qualified.  But, after that threshold has been met, it seems to me that the candidate who is the “best fit” be selected.  When Justice O’Connor retired, she said that Chief Justice Roberts (who was selected to replace her) was perfect in every way, except that he was male.  What she was saying is that he was not the best fit for the job at the time.  Justice O’Connor herself was not the “most qualified” but in the eyes of Reagan, she was the “best fit.”  The same can be said of Thurgood Marshall, Lewis Powell, Clarence Thomas, and countless others:  even if we had a workable operationalization of “best qualified” none of these justices would have risen to the top; however, they were all qualified and they were deemed to be the “best fit.”  Sonia Sotomayor also fits here.

In sum, I wold argue that qualifications are best judged like airplace landings….dichotomously.  One either is qualified or is not, just as an airplane either lands successfully or does not.  Once a candidate has been judged qualified, executives should move on to other things, such as fit.  This is both a normative statement as well as an empirical truth.

Want to know? You’ll have to check it out in a paper by the same name authored by Stephen Choi, G. Mitu Gulati, and Eric Posner. It’s available on SSRN here. I tell you what, I’ll give you the top five contenders for (best overall) state high courts and the abstract below the fold.

Top 5 State High Court Contenders (no particular order):

California

Arkansas

North Dakota

Montana

Georgia

(see page 24 of the manuscript).

ABSTRACT:

This paper ranks the high courts of the fifty states, based on their performance during the years 1998-2000, along three dimensions: opinion quality (or influence as measured by out-of-state citations), independence (or non-partisanship), and productivity (opinions written). We also discuss ways of aggregating these measures. California and Delaware had the most influential courts; Georgia and Mississippi had the most productive courts; and Rhode Island and New York had the most independent courts. If equal weight is given to each measure, then the top five states were: California, Arkansas, North Dakota, Montana, and Ohio. We compare our approach and results with those of other scholars and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, whose influential rankings are based on surveys of lawyers at big corporations.

I’d like to welcome another summer guest contributor to our blog – Damon Cann. Damon is an assistant professor of political science at Utah State University. His research includes work on Congress as well as work on state courts. He is the author of Sharing the Wealth: Member Contributions and the Exchange Theory of Party Influence in the U.S. House of Representatives (SUNY Press 2008) which won the 2009 Richard F. Fenno Jr. Prize. He earned his Ph.D. in 2004 from Stony Brook University. Our 2008 study, “Homegrown Institutional Legitimacy: Assessing Citizens’ Diffuse Support for Their State Courts” , appears in American Politics Research.

In keeping with the current baseball theme, I present some cool baseball graphics from flipflopflyball.com.

Here’s one on teams breaking the racial barrier.

Here’s one showing the relative height of Boston’s Green Monster:

And, finally, one that shows Major League Baseball relocations:

hat tip to buzzfeed

Following up on Chris’ excellent post regarding Mariano Rivera’s 500th save, I thought I’d share a quick post encouraging readers to check out a minor league baseball game.

Why?

1) They are cheap. While it’s easy to spend upwards of $75 a ticket on a major league baseball game, one can typically get great seats at a minor league game for less than $10. During the week, most franchises have specials that cut this even further. When I was in graduate school, the Binghamton Mets (AA) had a two for Tuesday special (that continues to this day). With a student ID, I could get seats on the third base line for about $4 and enjoy 2 for 1 Yuengling lagers.

2) They have tons of local color. Almost all minor league franchises have something unique to offer, especially regarding ballpark drink and fare. The Binghamton Mets sell speedies, marinated meat served on a hotdog roll. The Fort Worth Cats (Independent) feature beer from Rahr, a local brewery. The Quad Cities River Bandits (A) are holding a “Van Down by the River” contest at every game this season, giving fans the chance to take in a game from—you guessed it—a van down by the river.

3) You get to see the future stars of major league baseball. The most exciting part of minor league baseball is the opportunity to see the future stars of the game. While I was growing up, I had the opportunity to see Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Deion Sanders, Andy Pettitte, and Mariano Rivera play for the now defunct Albany-Colonie Yankees (AA). Rob Guidry even made a rehab start with the team. In graduate school, I remember watching David Wright and Jose Reyes play on the same team. There was no doubt those kids were going somewhere.

One of the things that is great about sports is that every game you have the chance of seeing something you have never seen before.  In that sense, it is the ultimate reality TV.  The other night, while watching the Yankees-Mets game (apologies to Mets fan Bob Howard), we witnessed such a moment.  With the Yankees leading by a run, they put in the best closer of all-time, Mariano Rivera.  He got the last out of the bottom of the 8th.  In the top of the 9th, with the bases loaded and 2 outs, Rivera’s turn to bat came up.  This was only the third time in his career (since 1995) that he batted in a major league game.  The Mets closer, Francisco Rodriguez (no slouch himself), fell behind 2-0.  Rivera worked the count to 3-2, and then Rodriguez delivered ball 4.  Not only had Rivera walked, but he got credit for a run batted in, since the runner from 3rd scored on the walk.

This got me wondering…has a closer ever earned an RBI in an MLB game.  A quick google search yielded….nothing.  My hunch is that the issue is “no.”  Closers generally enter the game in the 9th inning (or later) and if/when their time to bat comes up, they are generally pinch-hit for since the game is tight and ABs are valuable.  Moreover, there was no such thing as a “closer” until the 1970s–it is a modern development of the game.  Certainly, pitchers who have served as both starters and closers have RBIs (Derek Lowe, Ryan Dempster, etc.)  But….has a pitcher serving as a closer ever received an RBI?

If not, then Rivera’s Hall of Fame career just got even better.

Two interesting things to examine on the new legal economy:

First, Bill Henderson has a very interesting post on ELS. Check out the differences in salary distribution in 1991 and 2007 that he documents and discusses:

Second, a very intriguing take on the latest developments of the legal economy downturn for big firms and the downturn’s ramifications can be found on Law Shucks (hat tip Nancy Rapoport). The site describes itself as “a self-deprecating look at life in and after BigLaw.”

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Caperton v. Massey (http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/08pdf/08-22.pdf).  In this landmark ruling, the Court held that a judge must recuse himself/herself if there was an appearance of impropriety.  In this case, the CEO of Massey Energy (which had a case in the legal pipeline that was likely to be heard by the West Virginia Supreme Court) contributed over $2.5 million of his own money to a 527 group called And For the Sake of the Kids.  This group targeted the incumbent state supreme court justice Warren McGraw (and thus favored his opponent Brent Benjamin).  McGraw lost the election.  When the Massey case was heard by the West Virginia Court, Benjamin refused to recuse himself and voted with the 3-2 majority to overturn a multimillion dollar verdict.  The case is slightly more nuanced than that, but the above facts capture the essence of the case.

By a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it was a violation of due process for Benjamin to not disqualify himself.  Justice Kennedy wrote:  “We conclude that there is a serious risk of actual bias—based on objective and reasonable perceptions—when a person with a personal stake in a particular case had a significant and disproportionate influence in placing the judge on the case by raising funds or directing the judge’s election campaign when the case was pending or imminent.”  It is important to note that the Court did not find (or allege) that Benjamin’s vote was “bought.”  Rather, the mere appearance of bias was good enough.

Now, on the face of it, it is hard to argue with the Court’s conclusion.  After all, we can’t have biased judges hearing cases.  But, the Court’s conclusions were driven by a selective reading of the available evidence.  For example, 50% of West Virginia incumbents have lost their bids for reelection over the past 2 decades.  Incumbent defeats are not new events in WV.  Second, every newspaper in the state except one endorsed Benjamin over McGraw.  Third, the election was held in 2004.  West Virginia elects its judges on a partisan ballot, and West Virginia supported the reelection of George W. Bush.  It is not surprising that a down-ballot Democrat might lose under these conditions.  But the most damning piece of evidence arguing against the Court’s conclusion was a press release from the WV Supreme Court (http://www.state.wv.us/wvsca/press/march2_09.htm).  Of the 5 cases involving Massey Energy decided by the WV Supreme Court, Benjamin voted against Massey in 4 of them! Indeed, he supported $90.5 million in damages against Massey.  The only time he supported Massey was in the Caperton case, where he voted to overturn a $50 million verdict.  So, the CEO of Massey energy spent over $2.5 million of his own money to help elect Brent Benjamin…and Benjamin repaid him by costing his company $40 million.  Hardly the stuff of justice for sale.

The Chief Justice’s dissent goes into the plethora of unanswered questions raised by the case—I’ll not summarize them here.  I will close, though, with what I think is a likely outcome of the decision.  A conservative interest group in say, Texas, will now decide to support a liberal judge for the Court.  If the liberal wins, they can argue he/she should recuse himself/herself under Massey.  If the liberal loses, all the better since the candidate who is closer to the group will end up winning (and not have to worry about recusal since there is no appearance of impropriety).  Kennedy’s opinion stressed the “extraordinary” nature of the Massey case.  And maybe this case is like Bush v. Gore—good for one time only.  But I fear the Court has opened up a huge can of worms, and provided no guidance as to how lower courts should interpret and implement the decision.

Please welcome a new summer contributor to our blog, Chris Bonneau. Chris is an associate professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh.

He has authored multiple articles on law and courts topics and is the author of two books, Strategic Behavior and Policy Choice on the U.S. Supreme Court (with Thomas H. Hammond and Reginald S. Sheehan), and more recently, In Defense of Judicial Elections (with Melinda Gann Hall).

Chris earned his Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 2002. We look forward to his posts!

One of the problems in answering questions as to how liberal or conservative a judge might be is coming up with some acceptable measure of ideology. There is no generally accepted measure of lower court ideology. A judge’s own partisan affiliation and the ideology of a judge’s appointing president have often been employed as useful surrogates of judicial attitudes. Scholars have sometimes ignored the ideology of the judge, and inferred his or her ideology from that of the appointing president. For example, Tate and Handberg (1991) proposed a measure of the ideology of the appointing president: -1 for ideologically conservative and presidents, 0 for nonideological presidents, and 1 for ideologically liberal presidents.
A recent and now widely used ideology measure was devised by Giles, Hettinger and Pepper (2001). This uses the Poole Nominate scores of the home state senators or of the nominating president if there is no home state senator of the same party as the president. The scores can range from -1 (most liberal) to +1 (most conservative). If we examine the nomination of Sotomayor to the United States District Court in 1992, she was nominated by a Republican president with a Republican home state Senator – Al D’Amato. That would peg her ideology at the time at .14, very moderate and just slightly conservative, befitting a then Republican Senator representing a very Democratic state. However, it was well known that both New York Senators employed a courtesy relationship in reference to judicial appointments. Depending upon the party of the president, the Senator of the same party would get 3 out of every 4 judicial appointments and the other Senator 1 out of every 4. Sotomayor was clearly an appointment of Daniel Moynihan. So if we peg the ideology to Moynihan, -.562, then Sotomayor is very liberal. Of course this shows one of the problems with this particular measure, and indeed with any measure of ideology.
Her appointment in 1998 to the Second Circuit presents no such problem. Clinton was president, so we can use Moynihan’s score, which at this time was even more liberal, – .614. Thus by using the Giles, et. al. measure, Sotomayor is very liberal.
Another measure was developed by a former colleague of mine, Dave Nixon, developed a more direct measure for each judge. We first used this in a paper published in the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy (2003), and Scott Graves and I use it in our forthcoming book on recess appointments and I use it some other publications and it will be in another forthcoming book of mine of Courts and Tax policy. The calculation begins by using the nominate scores of congressional representatives who later served as federal judges as a formula for determining a nominate score comparable to Nominate scores. The formula then uses various circumstances surrounding the appointment such as unified government, wartime, party of the judge and party of the president, among other factors. Unlike the Giles, et. al. scores the Nixon/Howard scores allow for differences for judges even if appointed from the same state by the same president. The scores range from about -5, most liberal to + 5, most conservative.
Given all that, what is Sotomayor’s ideology based on both appointments? Although appointed first by a Republican president and then by a Democratic president, her ideology is similar in both, particularly since both took place under divided government. Her first score is – .21, while her second is -.28. Both liberal, to be sure, but both more moderate than the Giles, et. al. score.
Which is correct, what better predicts her future voting? Who knows, perhaps neither. We have not even begun to discuss the Segal Cover measure, more on that later.

Bob

A decade ago, it was fairly common for students of law and courts to lament the lack of interdisciplinary communication between political scientists, law professors, and scholars from other disciplines (e.g., Cross 1997; Rosenberg 2000). Fortunately, much has changed in the past decade. Indeed, it is clear that there is a growing trend toward interdisciplinary in the study of law and courts. In my mind, this is a most welcome development. I am particularly excited by the incorporation of social psychological perspectives to explain judicial decision making, an approach that makes up the core basis for much of Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making.

While I recognize the importance of interdisciplinary communication, one of things that has always struck me as odd is the lack of intradisciplinary communication among interest group scholars in political science. More specifically, it seems as if there are two communities of interest group scholars within political science: 1) those who study organizations in the courts and 2) those who study interest groups in the elected branches of government and/or among the more general populace. Even a cursory glance at the latter body of research reveals that students of interest groups in the elected branches rarely incorporate intuitions from interest group litigation research into their studies. This is unfortunate, for I am certain that these two groups of scholars have much to tell one another (see also Wasby 1997).

Recognizing this, Lisa Solowiej and I recently published an article that uses counteractive lobbying theory—originally developed to explain interest group interactions with member of Congress—to explain amicus curiae participation in the Supreme Court. In large part, our motivation for writing this article was to attempt to illustrate how interest groups lobbying the Court are often influenced by the same factors that shape interest group interactions with other political decision makers. In other words, we wanted to breakdown some of the barriers to intradisciplinary communication among political scientists studying interest groups.

Solowiej, Lisa A., and Paul M. Collins, Jr. 2009. “Counteractive Lobbying in the U.S. Supreme Court.” American Politics Research 37(4): 670-99. (gated; for a copy of the article, feel free to send me an email at pmcollins “at” unt “dot” edu.)

Theories of counteractive lobbying assert that interest groups lobby for the purpose of neutralizing the advocacy efforts of their opponents. We examine the applicability of counteractive lobbying to explain interest group amicus curiae participation in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions on the merits. Testing the counteractive lobbying hypotheses from 1953 to 2001, we provide strong support for the contention that interest groups engage in counteractive lobbying in the nation’s highest court. Our findings indicate that, like the elected branches of government, the Supreme Court is properly viewed as a battleground for public policy in which organized interests clash in their attempts to etch their policy preferences into law.

References

Cross, Frank B. 1997. “Political Science and the New Legal Realism: A Case of Unfortunate Interdisciplinary Ignorance.” Northwestern University Law Review 92(1): 251-326.

Rosenberg, Gerald N. 2000. “Across the Great Divide (Between Law and Political Science).” Green Bag 3(Spring): 267-72.

Wasby, Stephen L. 1997.  “Crosscutting the Subfields: Learning from our Colleagues.” PS: Political Science and Politics 30(4): 747-51.

… something light and fun to get you through the rest of the week – video of a guy named Ray attempting to break various items while wearing a strong man suit. The circus music and chimpanzee sounds are an especially nice touch. Thank goodness for the serious and thoughtful posting activity of our guest blogger program or you’d probably just get silly stuff like this from me during the summer.

For those of you who are frequent Adam Carolla podcast listeners and know Ray’s backstories, this will be especially fun. But even if you have no idea who he is, it’s still somewhat mindlessly entertaining.

A word of caution: it’s all fairly wholesome fun, but there is some course language when Ray gets frustrated. For what it’s worth, the link (above) works better than the embedded video below, which requires more manual labor to get the videos to all run one after the other. 

I want to thank Jeff and Andy for the introduction and opportunity to guest blog periodically on their website. Although I publish on all areas of law and courts, my particular area of expertise is on law and policy and I hope to blog about that in the near future.

However, one thing that is striking to me as I write for a blog that straddles the lines of political science and law are the differences in citation rates between law and political science and even between fields and subfields in political science.

I am very happy that my work appears to be cited highly and I am particularly pleased that many law professors cite my work. In fact, at least half of my citations are in law related journals and law reviews. However, one reason for that is law reviews cite many more sources than political science. The emphasis on footnotes and careful citation is the norm for law reviews. The entire citation process is very different for political science.

Indeed even within political science there are significant differences. In a 2007 article in PS: Political Science and Politics, Mike Giles and Jim Garand note the significantly lower citation rates of articles and books in American Politics (Giles and Garand, 2007 pp. 746-747) as compared to international and comparative studies. In our department we put some emphasis on citations for those seeking promotion and tenure to Associate Professor and it is very important for promotion to full, yet it appears to hurt those who write and research in American Politics as compared to those who specialize in IR and Comparative Politics.

Maybe I should not complain too much because public law encroaches on legal scholarship so we get the benefit of citations in law reviews and law journals.

I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to Jeff and Andy for the opportunity to guest blog on Voir Dire. Hopefully, the readers will find what I have to say at least marginally interesting. I plan to cover a number of topics, some academic, some not so much. Jeff and Andy were kind enough to give me fairly substantial leeway in terms of my posts and I plan to take them up on that offer.

I’ll begin with one of my favorite questions to ask prospective graduate students and faculty members: What drew you to the study of law and courts? Over the years, I’ve heard a wide range of answers to this question and they never cease to fascinate me.

I’ll share an abridged version of own narrative.

My father is an attorney who spent 20 plus years as a county legislator. My mother is a schoolteacher. Growing up, my parents instilled in me a strong sense of the importance of these career paths, although I was drawn most heavily to the law. I entered the University of Scranton fully set on going to law school. I could see the “Collins and Son, P.C.” sign in my head.

However, during the course of my studies at Scranton, two things occurred. First, I spent a summer working as a law librarian. This gave me a keen sense of the day-to-day activities of lawyers. I came to realize that the romantic view of lawyers often portrayed on television and in the movies rarely meshed with the real business of attorneys, even litigators. Second, I became fascinated with the life of academics. It occurred to me that a career spent educating, researching, and never leaving a college campus was exceptionally appealing. Indeed, I recall speaking with a faculty member at Scranton about my career path. When asked what I was interested in doing post-undergraduate, I replied “I kind of like your job.” With those words, I finally managed to get the courage up to explore something other than law school.

So there you have it. The offspring of an attorney/politician and a schoolteacher grows up to teach political science and law. It seems kind of silly that it took me into my early twenties to figure that one out.

I am very happy to introduce two guest contributors to our blog. As the summer progresses more guest contributors are scheduled to make appearances. The two bloggers who are beginning this week are actually both State University of New York graduates.

Bob Howard teaches at Georgia State University in political science and is the author of numerous articles on law and courts topics. Bob is also an experienced attorney and the current editor-in-chief of Justice System Journal. He earned his Ph.D. at SUNY – Stony Brook in 1998. 

Paul Collins teaches at the University of North Texas in political science and is the author of multiple articles on law and courts and a recent book, Friends of the Supreme Court: Interest Groups and Judicial Decision Making. He earned his Ph.D. at SUNY – Binghamton in 2005.

Please welcome both of them to the Voir Dire Blog.

We don’t often talk about case processing issues in the courts, but TRAC cares about it. Their new report finds:

that the failure to increase immigration judges — promised by the Bush Administration in the summer of 2006 — contributed to a substantial jump in the number of backlogged cases in the Immigration Courts.

and

that the waiting time required to dispose of the cases — many of them involving detained aliens — has grown much longer.

Here’s the report.