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78 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/valewenb78 and id is 1 raw text is: ESSAY How Different Are the Trump Judges? Stephen J. Choi* Mitu Gulati** Donald J. Trump's first presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, President Trump was open about how his judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues (e.g., guns, religion, and abortion) he was courting voters on. Other factors, such as age and personal loyalty to Trump, seemed important criteria as well. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking good judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges that underperform compared to judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020, to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as maverick behavior. With the caveat that we have less data on judges appointed by President Biden, Trump judges do not underperform. One might even say that they outperform expectations. IN TR O D U CTIO N .................................................................................. 2 * Faculty at New York University Law School. ** Faculty at the University of Virginia Law School. For conversations about the project, thanks to Aditya Bamzai, Josh Blackman, Betsy Grey, Thomas Jipping, David Lat, Michael Livermore, Joel Nomkin, Un Kyung Park, Eric Posner, Adam Pritchard, Micah Schwartzman, Lawrence Solum, Nina Varsava, Xiao Wang, Amy Wharton, Albert Yoon, and participants at a workshop at the University of Virginia. This project owes an enormous debt to Amy Wharton and to a superb team of research assistants from University of Virginia and New York University, which included Faith Chudkowski, Tara Chowdhury, David Del Terzo, Megan Fan, Avery Finkleson, Megan Lemon, Ishani Pandya, Isaac Sherman, Colby Woodis, and Stephanie Yang. 1

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