At the beginning of this year, I posed four big questions concerning judicial appointments in 2025. Let’s see how the year has answered them.
1. Will another Supreme Court vacancy arise?
No. (Well, there are a few days left in the year, so I suppose that “Not yet” is technically the correct answer.)
On the day after Donald Trump’s election in November 2024, I speculated that Justice Alito would announce his retirement in the spring of 2025. But as I stated in my January post, public pushback against that notion led me to lower the odds substantially.
The cornucopia of important and interesting cases before the Court surely has given every justice an incentive to stay on.
2. How many appellate judges will make a decision to take senior status or retire in the first half of 2025?
I guessed that “six to ten” of the 26 appellate judges who were appointed by Republican presidents and who were eligible to take senior status (or to retire with pension) would do so in the first half of 2025. But only three—Diane Sykes, Sandra Ikuta, and Duane Benton—took senior status, and Benton did not make his announcement until the end of October.
As a result, Trump was able to appoint only six appellate judges during 2025, just half of the total of twelve that he appointed in the first year of his first term.
3. How quickly will Trump begin making judicial nominations?
Trump made his first appellate nomination (Whitney Hermandorfer) on May 12. He made three other appellate nominations by mid-July. In his first term (when he had far more seats to fill), he made his first appellate nomination (Amul Thapar) on March 21, and he made seven other appellate nominations by mid-June.
Trump made his first district-court nominations at basically the same pace as in his first term. He nominated four district judges on May 12 and five more by mid-June. In 2017, he made two nominations on May 8 and four more by mid-June.
Joe Biden moved faster. He made his first three appellate appointments on April 19, 2021 and added in six more by mid-July. (He had more vacancies to fill than Trump did in 2025.) He nominated nine district judges in April 2021 and eight more by mid-June.
In addition to Trump’s 6 appellate appointments, the Senate confirmed 20 of his district-court nominees, including all but one who were nominated before mid-October. In 2017, the Senate confirmed only 6 of Trump’s district-court nominees.
Why the better numbers on district judges this year? In 2017, the White House placed a much higher priority on the large number of appellate nominations. In 2019, the Senate reduced post-cloture debate on district-court nominees from thirty hours to two hours, so it was much easier to get district-court nominees confirmed this year than it was in 2017.
Biden appointed 29 district judges in 2021.
4. Will Trump continue to make high-quality picks?
I give Trump high marks on five of his six appellate picks. Those five are all drawn from the heart of the conservative legal movement and are very much the sort of picks that Trump made in his first term.
The one exception I would note is Third Circuit judge Emil Bove. It’s much more on character than on ability that I would downgrade Bove, whose slavish loyalty to Trump accounts for his nomination.