According to Alliance for Justice, nearly 75 percent of Biden’s judicial nominees are women, and nearly 65 percent are people of color. For comparison, only 24 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees were women, and just 16 percent were people of color.
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While Clinton and Obama made a partial dent in the judiciary’s homogeneity, Trump zagged in the other direction, favoring straight white men. To combat this “whitewashing” of the judiciary, Biden and his advisers have ventured beyond the small circle of legal elites, seeking out lawyers who are too often overlooked by the usual gatekeepers.
This approach has led the White House to nominate candidates with a breadth of experience that goes far beyond what usually propels someone into the judiciary. For too long, Democratic and Republican presidents (including Obama) have elevated a disproportionate number of prosecutors and corporate lawyers to the bench. This bias skews and narrows courts’ perspectives; it deprives them of “a collaboration of minds with different voices, different perspectives, different experiences working together to solve problems,” as one judge noted. Or, to put it more cynically, it prejudices courts toward powerful corporations and prosecutors.
Under pressure from court reform groups like Demand Justice, Biden bucked this custom. He has nominated 21 public defenders, 14 civil rights attorneys, 10 plaintiff-side lawyers, three former legal aid lawyers, three consumer protection lawyers, and one labor lawyer. Already, he has doubled the number of former public defenders on the U.S. Court of Appeals. Several of his nominees previously fought for voting rights (Myrna Pérez and Dale Ho), marriage equality (Beth Robinson), and death row inmates (Holly Thomas). Their commitment to these controversial causes was not a deal-breaker for the White House; it was a selling point. At long last, courageous attorneys who stick their necks out to promote progressive values are being rewarded rather than punished by the Democratic establishment.