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Replication data for: On Tournaments for Appointing Great Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court

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Title Replication data for: On Tournaments for Appointing Great Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8ZSDCH
 
Creator Workshop on Empirical Research in the Law
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description In "An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Performance" (S. Cal. L. Rev. (2004)), Professors Steven Choi and Mitu Gulati are ambitious: They seek to quantify great legal minds. This interesting endeavor has both descriptive and normative components: Choi and Gulati hope not only to offer objective measures of what makes a judge great but also to impact the choices that presidents and senators make when appointing individuals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their procedures---which entail running the names of judges through various judicial tournaments---lead the authors to advocate a handful of well-known federal appellate judges for nomination to the high court.




Although Professors Choi and Gulati have unequivocally started a useful dialogue, we argue that their approach is so fraught with faulty assumptions and imperfect measures that to replace the current nomination procedures with the authors' tournament could lead to a series of harms that, in our view, may very well be serious than those we face under the existing system. In this article, we describe the drawbacks as we see them, and note that while the authors could readily fix so
me of the defects, others are inherent to the tournament and thus could not be remedied without rejecting the approach altogether.
 
Date 2005
 
Relation Lee Epstein, René Lindstädt, Jeffrey A. Segal, Chad Westerland. 2006. "The Changing Dynamics of Senate Voting on Supreme Court Nominees." Journal of Politics 68 (2): 296-307.
Study available here



Lee Epstein, Jeffrey A.Segal, Nancy Staudt, René Lindstädt. 2005. "The Role of Qualifications in the Confirmation of Nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court." Florida State University Law Review 32 (4): 1145-1173. study available here