“How Not to Pick Judges”

Maya Sen in the NYT Sunday Review:

RESEARCH has long shown that female judges vote differently from men on issues of sex discrimination, harassment and sentencing, while black judges vote differently from whites on issues involving civil rights and affirmative action.

Still, despite decades of effort by presidents and advocacy groups to promote minority and female candidates to the bench, our 1,355 sitting federal judges remain 81 percent white and 76 percent male.

A surprising part of the problem, as I show in a new study in the Journal of Law and Courts, is linked to the American Bar Association’s system for rating judicial candidates, which plays a surprisingly large role in judge selection.

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