The ABA Ratings and Minority Nominees: Shedding Light on Disparate Impact
Fair Courts E-lert
Bibliographic Info:
Author: Robert Raben
Source: ACS blog
Date: November 28, 2011
Robert Raben, a member of the American Constitution Society’s Board of Directors, responds at the ACS Blog to a recent New York Times article detailing how many of President Obama’s female and minority judicial nominees received a “not qualified” rating from the ABA screening panel. Raben presents several concerns about the underlying judicial nominee screening process, and urges the public to “figure out a way to have more open and hard and meaningful conversation about what is going on. For every tsk tsk we’ll hear about a minority candidate that just wasn’t ‘seasoned’ or of the proper ‘judicial temperament’, we might learn that the people doing the vetting, or the criteria relied upon, may be rooted in presumptions and parameters that aren’t as useful as they could be in determining whether or not a candidate will make a great or good judge.”