Scholarly Report. Historical Survey. Discouraging Exclusion of Asian Americans.

A Washington Post article today speculates how President Obama’s future federal bench appointments would add to its diversity, alluding to a new report from Brookings Institution’s Russell Wheeler, "The Changing Face of the Federal Judiciary."¹  It is discouraging that Asian Americans were systematically excluded in this purportedly scholarly study.

“Asian American judges have been so rare on the federal bench that Wheeler did not account for them in his historical survey.”

Revisiting a previous post from this blog, there are incongruous statistics related to their under-representation of Asian Americans in the federal courts.²

“However, of the 810 Article III judges actively serving on the federal bench, only seven, or less than 1 percent, are Asian American (data as of April 2008), while Asian Americans make up 3.6 percent of the U.S. population, according to the U.S. Census conducted in 2000.

“This under-representation might come from a lack of Asian Americans in the legal profession. But the Asian American Bar Association (AABA) reports that approximately 5.3 percent of all attorneys in our nation’s largest law firms and 6.3 percent of all law students are Asian American.”³

¹  “Who’s Sitting on the Federal Bench” by Robert Barnes in the The Washington Post
²  “Seven:  The number of federal judges who are Asian American”

See other related posts:
“President Obama Nominates Asian American Federal Court Judges”
“Federal Judge Takasugi:  Rest in peace!”
“American Justice Under Strain”