This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 11th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

There are large areas of the law where we simply don't know much about Brett Kavanaugh the new

nominee to the Supreme Court as he sits on the DC Circuit and doesn't get many of the

cases that would give Americans a sense of his philosophy of things like

police misconduct, education, and other areas.

Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, comments on the record of the new nominee to the Supreme Court.

What kind of cases does the DC circuit simply not see much of that we would hope a judge like

Brett Kavanaugh would have seen more of so he has a record in those areas.

The DC Circuit is very atypical of other courts. It hears lots and lots of

challenges to federal agency action.

Those are important of course, but because it only hears geographical challenges from the District

of Columbia, it tends not to hear things like police brutality cases or a prisoner cases or even school

discipline cases and I think of Neil Gorsuch for example when he was on the

10th circuit one of the cases that everyone noticed

was someone who had been sort of jerked around by the schools and I think Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And this was not a Washington issue particularly, but it was an issue that shows very dramatically how a case that can turn someone's life upside down, can wind up in federal court, and the standards applied can make all the difference.

So Kavanaugh comes, like several other members of the Supreme Court with this special

experience, obviously very helpful for many Supreme Court cases in the mysteries of

administrative law and separation of powers and things like that.

It isn't as if the court is getting more specialized this way because the last two judges

to leave the court, Schullian Kennedy came from the

D.C. Circuit and the ninth respectively and the two judges to replace them are from the

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