MSNBC: Biden outshines Trump — and Obama — by appointing public defenders as judges
This excerpt is from a piece that originally ran on August 15, 2021.
While President Barack Obama placed a heavy emphasis on addressing demographic diversity in his administration’s judicial nominations, there was far less attention paid to this question of experiential diversity. One 2014 study from the liberal Alliance for Justice found that Obama had nominated more than two times as many former prosecutors as former defenders to the bench. The Trump administration was far worse, nominating — among judicial picks with criminal law backgrounds — almost exclusively those with prosecutorial experience (a 10-to-1 imbalance, Cato’s study found).