Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-2025

Publication Title

American University Law Review

Keywords

federal judiciary, scientific training, federal circuit, STEM

Abstract

Should more judges have technical and scientific educations than are currently prevalent in the federal judiciary? This empirical study of the educational background of federal judges reports the undergraduate and graduate majors of active U.S. federal Article III judges. Information on the subject area of study is largely not publicly available, especially for judges appointed decades ago. This is the first and only publicly available research study of the subject areas of study of U.S. judges, collected via phone and email surveys to U.S. judges. The results of this study show that only 7.35% offederal judges have majors in science and technology fields. Although science and technology education can come from many areas of life, the lack of formal education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics among federal judges is worthy of critical examination.

This Article also discusses whether and in what circumstances judges might benefit from formal scientific training and what solutions could be implemented to improve the court's ability to understand and fairly rule on highly technical matters such as patent cases, criminal cases requiring evaluation of scientific evidence, or environmental law cases. This Article also recommends that at all levels, especially in district courts handling complex scientific cases, more judges should be appointed who have scientific training. More scientific training programs like the former Science for Judges program should be provided, ideally by nonpartisan groups. This Article also explores countervailing considerations that a push for judges with formal scientific education could negatively affect trends of gender and racial diversity in the federal judiciary, could result in industry capture or over-specialization, or could mean insufficient training in other equally important educational backgrounds in the social sciences and humanities.

Volume

74

Issue

4

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