When the Pentagon announced that they’d kneecaped themselves by refusing to give money to law students accepted to the country’s most prestigious and highly ranked law schools, it became a lot less obvious where they’d do their recruiting from. Before the last few weeks, the Department boasted the best and the brightest placed at elite law schools. Now, our best bet for figuring out which law schools still enjoy the Pentagon’s favor might be to pay attention to the schools Trump pulls his judges from. And as far as he’s concerned, petty things like adherence to the Constitution mean nothing compared to the new ideal: undying fealty to the Republican party.
And few schools highlight that devotion as boldly as the one named after a Supreme Court justice remembered for “pure applesauce” and a terrible dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges more concerned with name calling than legal analysis. That school of course is George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School — which was originally and infamously named the “Antonin Scalia School of Law” and will therefore forever be known around here as ASS Law.
And when it comes to judicial placement, ASS shook its way to the top under Trump’s leadership. Bloomberg Law has coverage:
Trump has tapped more graduates from George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School to be judges in his second term than from any other law school in the nation, according to a Bloomberg Law analysis of federal judiciary data on judicial appointments.
Three Scalia Law graduates were confirmed last year to federal district court judgeships, while two other alumni were announced as nominees earlier this month. If confirmed, those five Scalia Law alumni will outnumber Trump’s second-term judicial appointees from Harvard and Yale’s law schools combined.
The new appointments show the administration is starting to turn to a school historically known as being more conservative than others, and is putting less of an emphasis on elite academic credentials when it comes to picking future judges.
Judge placement has yuge consequences. There’s the obvious short term benefit of appointing someone that will seal the documents you’d rather not ever see the light of day, but there’s also the generational impact of knowing that the students that clerk for these judges will carry the flame. Unfortunately, that flame is likely to consist of shameless plugs for how willing you are to side with batshit opinions if it means avoiding the president publicly shaming you and avoiding the cuck chair. If he excoriated 3 Republican Supreme Court justices as “fools and lapdogs for the RINOs and the radical left democrats” because they had the nerve to not let him usurp Congress’ constitutionally mandated power of the purse, what type of jurisprudence commitments will his new judicial nominees have? Judge James Ho was aiming at the current roster of judges, but to borrow his words for this situation, prepare for judges with “[an] overinflated view of their intelligence and their abilities.” And while I have no hate for ASS law graduates specifically, the Trump administration doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to choosing which judges to vest with power.
George Mason Tops Harvard, Yale as Trump Judge Law School Source [Bloomberg Law]
Earlier: Pentagon Declares War On Good Law Schools Because Of Woke
DOJ Ditches ABA Judicial Vetting Because ‘Being Qualified’ Is Too Woke
In Shocking Twist, Judge Aileen Cannon Sides With Donald Trump. Again.
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s . He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boat builder who is learning to swim and is interested in rhetoric, Spinozists and humor. Getting back in to cycling wouldn’t hurt either. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
The post When It Comes To Judges, Trump Is An ASS Man appeared first on Above the Law.