We recently put together some stats on the governor’s judicial picks for an Exhibits feature page on CalLaw.com, which broke out stats on things like party affiliation and gender. In the process, we put together a huge (downloadable) spreadsheet that we thought might be of interest to other court watchers, now that we’re done with it. So we're sharing it, after the jump. Save it! Sort it! Add to it!
Plus, we'll add some more stats and demographic info — both official and unofficial — that we didn’t get to incorporate in Exhibits. Feeder jobs! Appellate seats filled! Ethnic minority numbers!
All that the judicial wonks out there are hoping for, and more, after the jump …
On our spreadsheet we tallied 421 appointees, with their gender, party affiliation and court level: View the Google-y version, or download the Excel file to your computer where you can fiddle with it to your heart's content. Leave us a comment below or e-mail us if you think we forgot anyone, and while you’re at it, do the same if you can think of any other data like this that you’d like to see gathered by The Recorder/CalLaw.com or on Legal Pad. Caveat: Please, don’t point out that we forgot to mention someone who was named presiding justice of a court of appeal division. We left those out on purpose, since they didn’t result in a “new face” on those courts. And a shout out: A couple of sources, including La Raza Lawyers, shared with us some unofficial lists they’ve been keeping. These helped us identify nine appointees (those names are bolded on our spreadsheet) who weren’t listed in the governor’s seemingly thorough bank of archived press releases. For their help, we are super grateful.
And now onto those additional observations on Arnold's judicial picks …
From our official list:
Schwarzenegger took forever to get his groove on: He took office in November 2003, and by the end of 2004 he’d only named six new judges and justices.
As we mentioned in last week’s Exhibits, Schwarzenegger has filled about 25% of the funded judicial seats statewide. But his impact on caselaw isn’t quite that big yet: He’s filled just 18, or about 16%, of the seats on the combined appellate and Supreme Court benches.
And from the unofficial lists shared with us, which, it should be noted, did not yet include the 23 appointees named in one swoop in late March:
Nearly 20% of the appointees were plucked from the ranks of court commissioners.
They think the appointees have included 28 African-Americans, 26 Asian/Pacific Islanders, and 39 Latinos — that’s 93 ethnic minorities. The percentages for each of these categories appear to be running higher under the current judicial appointments secretary, Sharon Majors-Lewis, than they were under her predecessor, John Davies.
— Pam Smith
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