Interruptions at Supreme Court confirmation hearings have been rising since the 1980s

As scholars of the confirmation process, we aim to measure what is measurable, in the hope that data can inform our more subjective perceptions of politics. And one measurable feature of Kavanaugh’s testimony is the striking number of times he interrupted the senators to challenge their comments or force his own point. Here, the historical record can shed some light. This article reviews the history of interruptions during Supreme Court confirmation hearings from 1939 to 2010

The Institutionalization of Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings

This article uses an original database of confirmation hearing dialogue to examine how the Senate Judiciary Committee’s role in Supreme Court confirmations has changed over time, with particular attention paid to the 1939–2010 era. During this period, several notable developments took place, including a rise in the number of hearing comments, increased attention to nominees’ views of judicial decisions, an expansion of the scope of issues addressed, and the equalization of questioning between majority and minority party senators. We demonstrate that these changes were shaped by both endogenous and exogenous factors to promote the legitimization of the Judiciary Committee’s role in the confirmation process and to foster the instrumental goals of senators. This research contributes to our understanding of the development of political institutions, interbranch interactions, and how institutional change affects the behavior of legal and political actors

Why not limit Neil Gorsuch — and all Supreme Court justices — to 18-year terms?

Legal scholars and political scientists increasingly question whether life tenure remains a good idea for Supreme Court justices. While scholars disagree about the exact numbers, our Supreme Court justices are serving longer and longer terms; presidents have incentives to choose younger and younger nominees; and the justices themselves appear to delay retirement in the hope of having an ideologically compatible president select their replacements. Moreover, the confirmation process has become increasingly contentious, culminating last year in Senate Republicans refusing to even grant a hearing to President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. As a result, many scholars propose a shift to staggered 18-year terms. What are the pros and cons of such a change? This article breaks down the positives and negatives of term limits for Supreme Court justices

Neil Gorsuch and the Ginsburg Rules

Supreme Court nominees testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee frequently invoke the so-called “Ginsburg Rule” to justify not answering questions posed to them. According to this “rule,” nominees during their testimony must avoid signaling their preferences about previously decided Supreme Court cases or constitutional issues. Using empirical data on every question asked and answered at every hearing from 1939–2017, we explore this “rule,” and its attribution to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We demonstrate three things. First, the Ginsburg Rule is poorly named, given that the practice of claiming a privilege to not respond to certain types of questions predates the Ginsburg nomination by decades. Second, the Ginsburg Rule really is two rules: one governing when nominees should not provide direct responses to certain types of questions, and a second governing when they should. Third, we show that Neil Gorsuch, despite his insistence to the contrary, did not really follow the example set by Justice Ginsburg. Instead, unlike Justice Ginsburg and most other recent nominees, Gorsuch regularly refused to articulate firm positions on even our most widely accepted constitutional issues and cases. In doing, we argue, Gorsuch’s practice risks diminishing one important way in which we as a society use Supreme Court confirmation hearings to debate and endorse constitutional change

The ‘Ginsburg Rule’ Is Not an Excuse to Avoid Answering the Senate’s Questions

An op-ed by Lori Ringhand and Paul M. Collins Jr. on Supreme Court nominees\u27 unwillingness to provide answers on cases under the wrongly named Ginsburg Rule. Nominees since the 1930s have balanced the competing needs of the Senate and the Judiciary by claiming a privilege to not opine on currently contested cases while freely offering their opinion about cases that used to be controversial but are no longer

Imported Asian swamp eels (Synbranchidae: Monopterus ) in North American live food markets: Potential vectors of non-native parasites

Since the 1990s, possibly earlier, large numbers of Asian swamp eels (Synbranchidae: Monopterus spp.), some wild-caught, have been imported live from various countries in Asia and sold in ethnic food markets in cities throughout the USA and parts of Canada. Such markets are the likely introduction pathway of some, perhaps most, of the five known wild populations of Asian swamp eels present in the continental United States. This paper presents results of a pilot study intended to gather baseline data on the occurrence and abundance of internal macroparasites infecting swamp eels imported from Asia to North American retail food markets. These data are important in assessing the potential role that imported swamp eels may play as possible vectors of non-native parasites. Examination of the gastrointestinal tracts and associated tissues of 19 adult-sized swamp eels—identified as M. albus “Clade C”—imported from Vietnam and present in a U.S. retail food market revealed that 18 (95%) contained macroparasites. The 394 individual parasites recovered included a mix of nematodes, acanthocephalans, cestodes, digeneans, and pentastomes. The findings raise concern because of the likelihood that some parasites infecting market swamp eels imported from Asia are themselves Asian taxa, some possibly new to North America. The ecological risk is exacerbated because swamp eels sold in food markets are occasionally retained live by customers and a few reportedly released into the wild. For comparative purposes, M. albus “Clade C” swamp eels from a non-native population in Florida (USA) were also examined and most (84%) were found to be infected with internal macroparasites. The current level of analysis does not allow us to confirm whether these are non-native parasites

A note concerning primary source knowledge

We present the results of running 4 different papers through the automated filtering system used by the open access preprint server “arXiv” to classify papers and implement quality control barriers. The exercise was carried out in order to assess whether these highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art filters can distinguish between papers that are controversial or have gone past their “sell-by date,” and otherwise normal papers. We conclude that not even the arXiv filters, which are otherwise successful in filtering fringe-topic papers, can fully acquire “Domain-Specific Discrimination” and thus distinguish technical papers that are taken seriously by an expert community from those that are not. Finally, we discuss the implications this has for citizen and policy-maker engagement with the Primary Source Knowledge of a technical domain