From a new ACS-sponsored guide on how to become a federal judge: "If you want to be a Court of Appeals judge, you should also develop a significant body of legal scholarship." Yes, because nothing helps a person sail through the Senate confirmation process like a significant body of legal scholarship.Good one! If you haven't been paying attention, committing yourself in writing to anything like a a political point of view will cause objections from one side or the other. From the point of view of confirmation, anything in writing is a "paper trail."
Robert Bork had a "significant body" of legal scholarship—that's partly what Kennedy's "Robert Bork's America" speech was about. Sonia Sotomayor's scholarship wasn't that significant, but it was politically significant.
John Roberts was confirmed with the votes of many Democrats because no one knew for sure that he was a conservative.
One man notable for his lack of a paper trail is Barack Hussein Obama, the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.
in 2008, Steve Sailer wrote that
Here we have the president of the Harvard Law Review, who was later employed as a Lecturer at the U. of Chicago Law School for eight years. Yet he has apparently never published a law journal article.This led to Obama's being "confirmed" as President. Obama did, of course, write an autobiography, but except for Steve Sailer, almost no one read it.
