Law Commons^™

Law, Politics, And The Appointments Process, Bradley W. Joondeph

Faculty Publications

In recent years, many commentators have called for the "depoliticization" of the judicial appointments process, arguing that politics and ideology have wrongly displaced objective merit in the selection of federal judges. In their book, Advice and Consent: The Politics of Judicial Appointments, Lee Epstein and Jeffrey Segal demonstrate why such prescriptions are misguided. Epstein and Segal are political scientists, not law professors, and thus have no normative stake in protecting constitutional law from politics, the preoccupation of many constitutional theorists. Instead, their aim is purely positive: to explain how the appointments process has actually functioned over the course of the …