Litigation

Judicial Vacancies Called a ?Fixable Crisis?

By Peter Hardin

Delays in confirming President Obama’s nominees for the federal courts have caused a true crisis in Colorado, according to the executive director of a Denver-based partner group of the Justice at Stake Campaign.

“We have one fixable crisis in Colorado,” Rebecca Love Kourlis of the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System wrote in a Denver Post commentary. She was referring to vacancies for two of Colorado’s seven federal district judgeships; both have been designated “judicial emergencies” due to caseload and the duration of the vacancies.

Parties to a case can not always get a hearing, or a court ruling on a motion due to the vacancies, she noted.

“There is plenty of blame to go around: the White House and the Senate share responsibility for the delay,” Kourlis added. Nominees for the two posts deserve swift Senate action, she contended. “Delay in the process of filling judicial vacancies,” Kourlis wrote, “is an injustice of its own.”

In The Tennessean, Jonathan Cole, president of the Nashville Bar Association, struck similar themes in a commentary that was headlined, “Citizens lose when judicial vacancies are left in limbo.”

You can learn background about the judicial backlog in the Senate, and controversy about it, from Gavel Grab.

Full post as published by The Gavel on October 11, 2010 (boomark / email).