What Makes the D.C. Circuit Different?

[Tx4obama]

What Makes the D.C. Circuit Different?

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Published: May 31, 2013

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is pushing a bill misleadingly called the Court Efficiency Act, which would eliminate three unfilled seats on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Next week, President Obama is expected to nominate three highly qualified lawyers for those seats, to bring the court to its full complement of 11 active judges. The Senate should confirm them quickly.

Senator Grassley insists that the District of Columbia court “is the least busy circuit in the country.” But that is simply not true, if measured by the number of pending appeals divided by the number of active judges. By that count, the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, encompassing seven states in the Midwest, including Iowa, has the lowest workload of any circuit. That was apparently of no concern to the senator when he recently helped speed through the confirmation of Jane Kelly to the court.

Arguing about the caseload, however, misses the point. As Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. explained in a 2005 lecture — “What Makes the D.C. Circuit Different?” — the court has a “special responsibility to review legal challenges to the conduct of the national government.” Because of that role, about two-thirds of the cases before the D.C. Circuit involve the federal government in some civil capacity, a far greater percentage than are before other appeals courts in the system.

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Full OP-ed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/opinion/what-makes-the-dc-circuit-different.html

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I got to know the son of a Chief Justice of the D.C. Circuit Court, Henry Edgerton.

I have a collection of his decisions and writings.

He was writing serious civil rights reform in the Forties and Fifties, making policy.

That Circuit Court is VERY important.