Letter: Banning Corporate Lawyers From the Federal Bench Would Be Bad for Diversity
No More Corporate Lawyers on the Federal Bench
If Democrats hope to reverse Donald Trump’s success in seeding the federal judiciary with extreme ideologues, Brian Fallon and Christopher Kang argued in August, they need to stop nominating corporate-law partners and start nominating lawyers who have represented workers, consumers, or civil-rights plaintiffs, or who have studied the law from that vantage point:
“Our point is not that corporate lawyers are incapable of becoming fair-minded judges,” they wrote. “Our point, rather, is that the federal bench is already filled with enough corporate lawyers, and that the law is being skewed in favor of corporations, giving them astonishing power.”
Having overseen the selection and vetting of more than 200 of President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees, former White House lawyer Christopher Kang, joined by veteran political operative Brian Fallon, now call for a revolution: no more corporate lawyers on the federal bench during the next Democratic administration. This simplistic proposal is unlikely to reverse the tide of pro-corporation, anti-consumer Supreme Court opinions. After all, Kang and Fallon acknowledge that jurists who would be disqualified under their proposal, such as Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Judge Patricia Millett, have opposed this trend. Instead, the
