The Decision-Making Ideology of Federal Judges Appointed by President Joe Biden

• In Event: Poster Session: Judicial Politics & Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Judicial Politics

Abstract

What is the general ideological disposition of the federal judges appointed by President Joe Biden during his first four years in office? Most information about his question has been anecdotal in nature. Some critics of the president, virtually all of them Republicans, have suggested that Biden’s judicial appointees have been “ultraliberals” who are ideological extremists. Democrats, on the other hand, have largely been satisfied with the Biden appointees to the bench and claim his nominees are highly qualified, mainstream jurists. So which side is correct – conservatives who contend that Biden’s appointees are leading the charge down the proverbial “slippery slopes of socialism” or their Democratic counterparts who argue that Biden’s judicial cohort consists of conventional progressives? And how does the ideology of the Biden judges compare to the judicial cohort appointed by his immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, and other 20th century presidents?

To answer these questions, we will analyze over 300 decisions by judges appointed to the U.S. district courts by President Biden from 2021 to 2023, along with 395 rulings handed down by judges appointed to the federal trial court bench by President Trump from 2017 to 2020. These decisions will be studied along with over 117,000 opinions by over 2,400 judges published in the Federal Supplement from 1932 through 2020. This data has been used in prior research on the U.S. district courts (Carp, Manning and Holmes 2022).

Authors

• Kenneth L. Manning, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

• Robert Carp, University of Houston