American Bar Association

The American Bar Association is a national association of United States lawyers whose stated purpose is the improvement of lawyers and the administration of justice. The organization was founded in 1878 and has over 300,000 members. Every state and city has affiliated groups. Nearly all law schools must pass rigid accreditation by the ABA.

In practice, the ABA has become a puppet of pro-abortion ideologues, and it has smeared multiple pro-life judicial nominees with unjustified "not qualified" evaluations.^[1]

Rating candidates for federal judgeship[edit]

The ABA since the 1920s played a major role in approving federal judges until it was dropped by the George W. Bush administration because of liberal bias. Numerous scholarly studies have demonstrated that liberal nominees do better in the process than conservative ones.^[2] Holding all other factors constant, those nominations submitted by a Democratic president were significantly more likely to receive higher A.B.A. ratings than nominations submitted by a Republican president. However, the effect of higher ABA ratings on the likelihood of being confirmed is fairly small. Of all candidates for federal appeals court seats who received the group's highest rating between 1977 and 2000, 85% were confirmed; but candidates with lower ratings were confirmed between 71% and 80% percent of the time.^[3]

The ABA claims it does not consider ideology in its ratings, claiming to base them only on professional competence, integrity, and judicial temperament. It is the third factor, one the association defines to include compassion, open-mindedness and commitment to equal justice under the law, that critics say leaves room for subjective judgments that may tend to favor liberals.

Three exceptionally distinguished conservative judges, Richard A. Posner and Frank H. Easterbrook, both on the federal appeals court in Chicago, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III, on the federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., all received mixed ratings in which a majority of the committee found them “qualified” and a minority “not qualified.”

Recent Supreme Court nominees, including conservatives John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and liberals Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all received the group's highest rating. Bush nominee Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination before the bar association issued a rating; both liberals and conservatives opposed her.

Conservative Clarence Thomas was given a split rating of “qualified” and “not qualified.” Judge Robert Bork, the conservative whose nomination was rejected by the Senate in 1987, received a curious split decision, with the majority calling him “well qualified” but four members saying he was “unqualified.”

In another instance in 2017, the ABA rated Leonard Grasz, the Trump Administration nominee for the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals as "not qualified" due to his pro-life stance on abortion and his past criticism of the ABA.^[4] The organization improperly maligned several other qualified originalist judicial nominees.^[5]

Further reading[edit]

• Abel, Richard L. American Lawyers. (1989). 406 pp.

See also[edit]

• Bernardine Dohrn

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• American Bar Association