Diversity and judicial nominations in the Eleventh Circuit

Judicial nominations have been a hot topic recently, with most stories focusing on the Senate fight over the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.  For a different angle on the nomination process, take a look at this article that The Atlantic ran last week questioning why the White House isn’t making a greater effort to appoint more black judges to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals and to the federal district courts in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.  

While recognizing that the President “has nominated more women and candidates of color than any of his predecessors,” the article argues that the President has a “dismal record” in successfully appointing black men and women to the federal bench in these three particular states.  For example, in discussing appointments to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the article points out:

• that the Eleventh Circuit’s territory has “the highest percentage of blacks” of any federal circuit territory in the country (approximately 25%);
• that only one of the Eleventh Circuit’s sixteen judges is black;
• that the Eleventh Circuit has had only two black judges since being created in 1981;
• that the Eleventh Circuit has never had a black female judge;
• that there have been six vacancies on the Eleventh Circuit since the President took office in 2009;
• that the President has not appointed a single black man or woman to fill those vacancies.

That made me wonder: Is it fair, when assessing a president’s track record on appointing minorities to the bench, to consider the appointments region by region, or should we look at the president’s overall national numbers?  And, if we go region by region, should a region share some of the blame if it has low minority representation on the federal bench?  The Atlantic’s article recognizes that the three states’ Senate delegations have “something to do with” the lack of diversity in the federal courts in the Eleventh Circuit.  But it also says that “there is a lack of steel behind the White House’s push for judicial diversity” in those states.  Then it ends on this note:

The president’s failure to nominate more black candidates in those three states, and his refusal to fight more strenuously for those black candidates he has nominated there, is not the typical give-and-take of politics. In context, it’s a capitulation to southern Republican officials, including some of the very ones who helped doom the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, at a time when minorities are being disenfranchised by Republican officials in Florida and Alabama and other Southern states, the continuing lack of black representation on our federal benches sends another strong message of a tolerance for unequal justice.

It’s fair to ask why the presence of judges of a particular race ought to matter. In a perfect world, it wouldn’t. But the American legal system, and especially its criminal justice systems, still are riven by vast racial divides. Nowhere is this more true than in the Deep South, where racial disparity in sentencing still is profound and where black murder suspects are far more likely to be charged with a capital crime, and far more likely to be sentenced to death, than their white counterparts. President Obama, the noted constitutional scholar, knows all this. And yet he still fails to move decisively to remedy it.

Too harsh?  Not harsh enough?  For a comparison of the last three presidents’ nomination statistics, click here.  Let me hear your thoughts on the topic in the comments.