The president's list includes executive power enthusiasts and a free-market advocate.
By Damon Root
http://reason.com/blog/2017/05/09/trump-announces-10-judicial-nominees-to/printPresident Donald Trump has announced the names of 10 nominees he is putting forward to fill vacancies on
federal courts around the country. Much like the list he released last year of potential Supreme Court candidates, these
lower-court picks are all accomplished and respected legal figures. Unlike the SCOTUS list, however, this group features
not only sitting judges, but also law professors and practicing attorneys.
This batch of lower-court nominees leans heavily in the direction of traditional legal conservatism. For instance, there is
Michigan Supreme Court Justice Joan Larsen, who served in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush
administration and who is known as a strong advocate of executive power and as a proponent of the use of presidential
signing statements. Trump has nominated Larsen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit.
The list also features conservative advocates of judicial deference to government regulation. The distinguished Notre Dame
law professor Amy Coney Barrett, for example, who Trump has nominated to the 7th Circuit, is a sharp critic of the libertarian
legal movement's calls for greater judicial protection of economic liberty. Her writings include a defense of "deferential judicial
review of run-of-the-mill legislation" on the grounds that such judicial deference "is consistent with the reality that the harm
inflicted by the Supreme Court's erroneous interference in the democratic process is harder to remedy than the harm inflicted
by an ill-advised statute."
But it's not all judicial deference all the way down. For example, Trump's nominee to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims is Damien
Schiff, a senior lawyer at the Pacific Legal Foundation, a public-interest law firm that routinely defends the rights of entrepreneurs
and property owners. Schiff is a skilled litigator who is perhaps best known for arguing and winning the 2012 case of Sackett v.
Environmental Protection Agency before the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue in that dispute was whether the EPA's use of "administrative
compliance orders," which were basically government commands to property owners, should be subject to judicial review under
the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. The EPA lost 9-0. In contrast to Professor Barrett, Schiff has said that the federal
courts should play a more aggressive role when it comes to policing the other branches and striking down economic regulations.
He has written favorably about the idea that "there will be a legitimate and prominent role for considerations of economic liberty"
at the Supreme Court . . .
Damon Root, by the way, has written one of the best books I've ever read about the Supreme Court:
