{"id":128827,"date":"2025-07-29T15:50:14","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/07\/29\/the-incredible-shrinking-circuit-court\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T15:50:14","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:50:14","slug":"the-incredible-shrinking-circuit-court","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/07\/29\/the-incredible-shrinking-circuit-court\/","title":{"rendered":"The Incredible Shrinking Circuit Court"},"content":{"rendered":"

Is the Tenth Circuit about to get smaller? That\u2019s what the U.S. Judicial Conference\u00a0wants \u2014 in a new report<\/a>, they\u2019ve asked President Donald Trump to keep a vacancy open the next time one opens up on the Denver-based Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It\u2019s part of an effort to combat low per-judge caseloads; similarly, they\u2019re asking for vacancies to be kept open on the district courts in the Southern District of West Virginia, the Eastern District of Michigan, and the District of Wyoming.<\/p>\n

But the recommendations are unlikely to be heeded. The Conference made a similar recommendation about the Tenth Circuit in the Trump I reign \u2014 and was promptly ignored. (Trump named two judges to that appellate court in his first term, and Joe Biden also made two appointments to the chronically un-busy circuit court.) In fact, Russell Wheeler, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Reuters he\u2019s unaware of *any* president intentionally leaving a seat vacant, \u201cI suspect the Conference is aware that these recommendations are likely to be ignored, but makes them anyway partly to present itself as a careful steward of public funds.\u201d<\/p>\n

This general sentiment is supercharged in the case of Donald Trump, a president who is uniquely focused on remaking<\/a> the federal judiciary. During his first term in office, Trump nominated almost as many members of the federal judiciary in four years as Barack Obama did in eight<\/a>, and the federal bench\u2019s intentional shift <\/a>to the right will have an impact on the future <\/a>of the country for generations.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her<\/a> with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post The Incredible Shrinking Circuit Court<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Is the Tenth Circuit about to get smaller? That\u2019s what the U.S. Judicial Conference\u00a0wants \u2014 in a new report<\/a>, they\u2019ve asked President Donald Trump to keep a vacancy open the next time one opens up on the Denver-based Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It\u2019s part of an effort to combat low per-judge caseloads; similarly, they\u2019re asking for vacancies to be kept open on the district courts in the Southern District of West Virginia, the Eastern District of Michigan, and the District of Wyoming.<\/p>\n

But the recommendations are unlikely to be heeded. The Conference made a similar recommendation about the Tenth Circuit in the Trump I reign \u2014 and was promptly ignored. (Trump named two judges to that appellate court in his first term, and Joe Biden also made two appointments to the chronically un-busy circuit court.) In fact, Russell Wheeler, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Reuters he\u2019s unaware of *any* president intentionally leaving a seat vacant, \u201cI suspect the Conference is aware that these recommendations are likely to be ignored, but makes them anyway partly to present itself as a careful steward of public funds.\u201d<\/p>\n

This general sentiment is supercharged in the case of Donald Trump, a president who is uniquely focused on remaking<\/a> the federal judiciary. During his first term in office, Trump nominated almost as many members of the federal judiciary in four years as Barack Obama did in eight<\/a>, and the federal bench\u2019s intentional shift <\/a>to the right will have an impact on the future <\/a>of the country for generations.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast<\/a>, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her<\/a> with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1<\/a>\u00a0or Mastodon @Kathryn1@mastodon.social.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post The Incredible Shrinking Circuit Court<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Is the Tenth Circuit about to get smaller? That\u2019s what the U.S. Judicial Conference\u00a0wants \u2014 in a new report, they\u2019ve asked President Donald Trump to keep a vacancy open the next time one opens up on the Denver-based Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. It\u2019s part of an effort to combat low per-judge caseloads; similarly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":128828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/xira.com\/p\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/IMG_5243-1-scaled-e1623338814705-620x568-lin71C.jpg?fit=620%2C568&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}