Legal News

WaPo: Partisanship Alive and Well at Sixth Circuit

By Ashby Jones

Partisanship may be something the incoming Obama administration is trying to get away from, but it’s still very much alive and kicking on the 6th Circuit, the federal appellate court that covers Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Click here for the page-one story today in the Washington Post.

From where we sit, the most interesting current to emerge from the story was the alleged use of the en bancs on the circuit, i.e., that Republican-appointed judges are increasingly calling for en banc hearings — hearings from the full court — in order to reverse rulings made by three-judge panels that they don’t like.

“Anytime two of us show up on a panel and they don’t like it, they yank it,” said one Democratic-appointed judge on the circuit. Under 6th Circuit rules, that’s now how it’s supposed to work. According to the Post, en bancs are allowed in order to ensure “uniformity of the court’s decisions” when separate panels of three randomly appointed judges disagree, or when questions of “exceptional importance” are at stake. According to Post research, initial verdicts by panels dominated by Democratic appointees were clearly reversed by Bush’s appointees and other Republican picks 17 times out of 28 decisions issued by the full court.

Chief judge and Reagan appointee Danny Boggs said, however, that party affiliation is not uniformly predictive, noting that he has occasionally sided with Democratic appointees and that most rulings by three-judge panels are unanimous.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 08, 2008 (boomark / email).