Biden's judicial appointees — more than 200 judges — are making their mark

The Second Circuit issued three decisions on Monday; all three were written by Biden appointees. Also: Other news around the web.

There are many metrics for assessing the 205 lifetime tenure judges confirmed thus far in the Biden administration and Democratic-led Senate.

Senate Democratic staff are measuring away currently, and as a spokesperson for a senior Senate Democrat noted to Law Dork, they’re two up on Donald Trump. When the Senate took its August recess back in 2020, the Trump administration and Republican-led Senate stood at 203.

But who those 205 appointees are matters. In addition to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — who earlier had been the first appellate judicial confirmation of the Biden administration — there have also been 42 other confirmations to the federal appeals courts. There have also been 159 district court judge confirmations and 2 confirmations to the U.S. Court of International Trade.

According to the spokesperson, about two-thirds of the judges are women and about two-thirds are people of color.

Incredibly: Two of every five — 82 — are women of color. Those include more Black women confirmed to appeals court judgeships than all other presidents combined.

There is also significantly more experiential diversity among the Biden appointees, including several civil rights lawyers and public defenders.

In a “show, don’t tell” moment that highlights how the Biden appointees are making their mark, let’s look at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Biden has had six nominees confirmed to the court, which stands at a 7-6 split of Democratic to Republican appointees.

The appeals court handed down three decisions on Monday.

Biden appointees wrote all three unanimous three-judge panel opinions. (Notably, in two of the three cases, there was a Republican appointee on the panel — both were George W. Bush appointees — but neither dissented.)

In the first, Judge Beth Robinson — a lesbian who was key, at several points over the years, to bringing marriage equality to Vermont — wrote the decision applying the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 to a company’s effort to force a woman’s hostile work environment claims, which include underlying sexual assault allegations, into arbitration. The lower court rejected the company’s effort, and the Second Circuit affirmed that decision, allowing the woman’s claim to remain in federal court.

In the second, Judge Eunice Lee — a Black former public defender who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that she had represented “poor and working-class people convicted of felony offenses“ for “the entirety of [her] legal career” — wrote the decision rejecting a Connecticut police officer’s claim for qualified immunity. After a man told the officer he had a firearm permit and a firearm in his car, the officer is alleged to have handcuffed the man, searched his entire car, and placed the man in a police car for more than half an hour. A lower court rejected the officer’s claim for qualified immunity as to those actions, and the Second Circuit affirmed that on Monday.

In the third, Judge Alison Nathan — a lesbian who worked in the Obama White House counsel’s office — wrote the decision rejecting most of a Connecticut town’s arguments in a Fair Housing Act case addressing what Nathan referred to as “reprehensible conduct” by the town in seeking to prevent a company from establishing a group home for individuals with mental health disabilities in the town. The Second Circuit rejected the town’s arguments against the substance of the jury’s verdict but held that the $5 million punitive damages award was unconstitutionally excessive — ultimately concluding that $2 million would be the highest appropriate amount.

Judges matter. Not just by the numbers or because of their background, but because of the power they hold in deciding cases day in and day out. As much as we focus on the Supreme Court, very, very few cases get there. Appeals court decisions — for the vast majority of cases — decide how people’s rights can and will be exercised.

On Monday, in the Second Circuit, we got an excellent snapshot of how that can look when Biden’s appointees are writing the decisions.

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Around the web

I don’t often do link roundups here, as I generally want to dig into pieces — or report on the stories myself — if I’m sharing them with you. But, that also means there can sometimes be a whole boatload of stories that don’t make it from my bookmarks and tabs to you.

So, here are some pieces that hadn’t yet made it into Law Dork but that I think are worth your time.

Post-Roe fallout:

• The latest Strict Scrutiny episode, “State of the Uterus,“ is a must-listen to be in the loop on how Project 2025 would address reproductive rights. Spoiler: It’s bad.

• If you missed The New York Times’s report on the backstory of the end of Roe v. Wade, check it out — or you can now also get Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer‘s book, The Fall of Roe.

• And, on Monday, the Associated Press reported that its investigation of federal hospital investigations found that “[m]ore than 100 pregnant women in medical distress who sought help from emergency rooms were turned away or negligently treated since 2022” — a stark reminder that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization wasn’t only about abortion.

Democracy:

• The New York Times published a detailed, sobering report last month on how Trump’s team is preemptively trying to coup this election: “[U]nlike the chaotic and improvised challenge four years ago, the new drive includes a systematic search for any vulnerability in the nation’s patchwork election system.”

• Marc Elias, a key election lawyer for the Democrats, highlighted just last week one area where that was happening.

  

Two final reads:

• This piece in the Texas Observer from Steven Monacelli is more than worth your time.

• And, don’t miss Pro Publica on the Project 2025 training videos.