The truth may be that the judges actually believe what they are writing. For the left, that truth is too hard to process, so they rely on the "auditioning" charge.

Josh Blackman | 1.11.2026 11:48 AM

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This maxim comes to mind when journalists who lack any legal background attempt to engage in complicated empirical studies of judicial decisions.

The latest headline from the New York Times is titled "Trump's 'Superstar' Appellate Judges Have Voted 133 to 12 in His Favor."

But the data suggests that in the 13 appellate courts, there is increasingly such a thing as a Trump judge. The president's appointees voted to allow his policies to take effect 133 times and voted against them only 12 times. . . .

The Times analyzed every judicial ruling on Mr. Trump's second-term agenda, from Jan. 20 to Dec. 31 of last year, or more than 500 orders issued across 900 cases. About half of rulings at the appellate level were in Mr. Trump's favor — better than his performance with the district courts, though worse than his record at the Supreme Court, where the rulings on his agenda have almost all been on a preliminary basis in response to emergency applications.

My immediate reaction concerned not the numerator, but the denominator. How many Trump circuit appointees were actually able rule on Trump cases? For starters, the authors do not define what it means to rule "in Mr. Trump's favor." Does that include a random APA challenge to a regulation passed in a prior administration? Or do they count a mundane Title VII case against a federal agency? The authors do not actually share their data set, which makes scrutinizing it impossible. At least academics share their data, which makes it possible to dissemble the studies.

Let's assume the data set is limited to litigation against Trump executive actions. The majority of the anti-Trump litigation has been filed in the First Circuit, where until recently, there were zero Trump appointees. Then there is the D.C. Circuit, where Judges Katsas, Rao, and Walker are the only ones. I can think of a smattering of Fourth and Ninth Circuit opinions where Trump appointees would up on the panels, but that is a small number.

If you read about three-quarters of the way down, you get to what might be called a selection bias in the data set:

Mr. Trump's success on appeal has also been........

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