This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, January 29th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As Stephen Breyer prepares to depart from the Supreme Court,

how balanced is the judiciary in terms of experience actively supporting

government or defending people against it?

Clark Neely is Senior Vice President for Legal Studies at the Cato Institute, we discussed

why so many judges are former prosecutors

and why it matters for justice that there are more skeptics on the high court.

What do we know about the makeup of the judiciary in the United States today in terms of like who they've

represented what their backgrounds are and where you know some unconscious biases might lie.

Well, I think the most notable thing about the judiciary and the backgrounds of judges,

contrary to a lot of people think they talk about, oh all went to Ivy League schools or they all worked for big

firms or whatever the most significant professional facet of of judges in terms of what they used to do is that a wildly disproportionate

number of judges used to be prosecutors or other courtroom advocates for

government. How do we get that? Because I can imagine political ads, somebody running for judge and they said, oh, this guy had

the audacity to defend criminals in court if you're a defense attorney and, you know, people

who don't follow judicial races or

understand what defense attorneys are supposed to do might be be swayed by that.

Well I think that's right I think that that you know there's a sort of sense that people who were criminal

offense attorneys whether public defenders or otherwise made a decision to choose a side in the criminal justice system

that is, you know, the accused and there's sort of this presumption which perhaps there should not be

that their clients are guilty and you know that criminal

...