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US to curb ABA’s role in assessing judges

The US government is moving to restrict the role played by the American Bar Association (ABA) in the appointment of judges, according to the ABA Journal. 

It reports on a letter posted on X by US Attorney General Pam Bondi last week, which said that the ABA “no longer functions as a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications” and accused it of favouring nominees from the Democratic Party. 

The letter announced that the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy would not ask judicial nominees to provide waivers that allowed the ABA to access their bar records and other non-public information.

Bondi also said that nominees would not respond to the ABA’s questionnaires or be interviewed by the association. 

'Seismic change’ 

The ABA has not yet commented on the letter. 

Since 1953, a special committee of the ABA has assessed judicial candidates on three metrics: professional competence, integrity, and judicial temperament. 

It has only three ratings: ‘well qualified’, ‘qualified’, and ‘not qualified’. 

According to the ABA Journal, the committee had previously come under fire after some of Trump’s first-term judicial nominees were rated ‘not qualified’. 

Senator Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, described the move as “a seismic change” in the judicial-nominations process, adding that it overturned a practice that had been in place for 70 years. 

Eariler this year, the ABA called on all US lawyers to speak out against what it described as “intimidation” by officials in the Trump administration.