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The Chief Justice as Executive

Judicial Conference Committee Appointments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Dawn M. Chutkow
Dawn M. Chutkow*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

This article is the first comprehensive empirical study of chief justice appointments to the Judicial Conference committees of the US Courts, entities with influence over substantive public and legal policy. Using a newly created database of all judges appointed to serve on Judicial Conference committees between 1986 and 2012, the results indicate that a judge’s partisan alignment with the chief justice matters, as do personal characteristics such as race, experience on the bench, and court level. These results support claims that Judicial Conference committee selection, membership, and participation may present a vehicle for advancing the chief justice’s individual political and policy interests.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , Fall 2014 , pp. 301 - 325
Copyright
© 2014 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

My thanks to Theodore Eisenberg (1947–2014), Martin Wells, participants in the 2013 Cornell–Tel Aviv Empirical Legal Studies Conference, two anonymous reviewers, and the journal’s editorial board for helpful comments on earlier versions of the article. My thanks as well to Nicole Heise for her excellent research assistance.

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