Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump's Smart Outsourcing of Judicial Picks

Nominees for the appeals court bench are brilliant lawyers, who happen to be conservative.

May 8, 2017 at 8:33 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Here come the judges.
Photographer: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

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Plenty of Donald Trump’s decisions have been outside the conservative mainstream. But when it comes to judicial nominees, the Republican president seems to be calling them right out of the Federalist Society playbook. First came his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, whose selection was predictable based on his elite legal conservative credentials. Now the individuals in his first wave of appellate nominees seem to be cut from the same cloth.

I know several of the nominees personally and others by reputation -- and that’s not a demographic accident. Trump is naming judges from my generational cohort, roughly mid-40s to early 50s. Lots of the nominees come from the legal academy and clerked for the Supreme Court. These are environments in which legal elites meet early and stay loosely in touch for a lifetime.