Judges, Judging, and Judgment: Character, Wisdom, and Humility in a Polarized World by Chad M. Oldfather

In Judges, Judging, and Judgment, law Professor Chad Oldfather mounts an interdisciplinary critique of the current U.S. judiciary, offering a corrective to the ways in which we evaluate and choose candidates for judgeships. Dominated by politics and rife with political polarization, our generally empirical approach to understanding all things including judges and their behavior leads those who appoint or elect judges to rely heavily on ideology to evaluate and predict the contributions judicial candidates will make. Oldfather argues that, because we pin qualifications only to things that we can measure and because, using empirical measures, we invariably conclude that all that matters is partisan affiliation (or maybe policy predisposition), we forget (and judges forget) that judges are not mere politicians. The entire reason we have courts is to authoritatively resolve disputes; and for judges to ably resolve especially contentious disputes, they must exercise judgment. When judges do so with independence and relying on preexisting legal norms, they earn and maintain public trust, guarding the rule of law, essential to a democratic society. What we need to do, according to Oldfather, is to choose judges who do the work of judging well. Getting the right judges is impossible given the currently emphasized considerations. Only if we start taking seriously the fact that good judges and good judging require good judgment can we hope to undo the damage to court legitimacy that our current situation has wrought.