This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 23rd, 2019.

I'm Keelip Brown.

How many federal judges come from being advocates for the government? And how many come from being advocates for the government and how many come from

advocating for individuals groups and companies against the government? The

answer might not surprise you but Cato's Clark Neely explains why that matters for courts.

His new study is available today at Cato.org.

There's a pretty widespread belief that judges are more likely to be former prosecutors than former defense

attorneys and at least within the realm of elected judges I can see why people

might suspect that because criminal defense attorneys are often

defending people who are unpopular and those are often used in television ads against

them. At the federal level, what do we know about the breakdown of judges?

So there is this perception that the surest way to become a federal judge is to first be a prosecutor.

Interestingly, no one ever actually looked to see if that was true.

In other words, no one ever studied the professional background of every sitting federal judge to determine whether in fact prosecutors and other former government advocates are disproportionately represented on the federal judiciary.

So we did that.

We actually looked at all of the 755

non-senior status Article 3 judges,

and we found that the perception is absolutely correct and if you look for example just

at the ratio of former prosecutors to former criminal defense attorneys it's

four to 1.

If you broaden that as we did and compare former

advocates, former courtroom advocates for government,

...