How good a judge is Biden’s nominee to the D.C. Circuit?

by Paul Mirengoff

Joe Biden has nominated Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She currently sits on the U.S. District Court in D.C. This nomination was 100 percent expected. In fact, there has been speculation that Biden promised to nominate Judge Jackson to pacify radicals unhappy with the selection of Merrick Garland for Attorney General (as if the selections of radical race mongers Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke for top DOJ jobs weren’t enough). Garland’s move to the Justice Department opened up a seat on the D.C. Circuit...................

Judge Jackson is a left-liberal, but doesn’t appear to fall outside the mainstream of left-liberal thinking on legal issues. All of this — her credential and her ideology — point in the direction of Senate confirmation.  However, Ed Whelan, who follows these things much more closely than I do, raises a salient point. He contends that Judge Jackson is a mediocre jurist at the district court level.

He writes:

Jackson is not highly regarded as a judge. Inquiries I have made recently of folks knowledgeable about her work confirm that she continues to have a middling reputation. This criticism, I’ll emphasize, is on grounds of quality, not ideology. Indeed, she is not regarded as ranking high among the ten or so district judges that President Obama appointed to the federal district bench in D.C. . . .Jackson has a striking record of reversals by the D.C. Circuit—including by liberal judges—in her high-profile rulings:.........The D.C. Circuit reversed Judge Jackson. All three judges on the panel agreed that she got things very wrong. They differed only on which error required vacating her injunction.........

There is a good chance, then, that Judge Jackson is an affirmative action nominee for the D.C. Circuit. In other words, she was selected because of her race, which trumped her mediocre record.............it’s unsettling to think that the quality of the appellate bench — especially that of the all-important D.C. Circuit — might be diluted in the name of diversity............To Read More. 

   See my list of updates on this SCOTUS nominee.