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Bush Appointees Most Conservative Judges Ever

A new study shows

A study of thousands of federal court cases has found that judges appointed by President Bush are the most conservative on record in the areas of civil rights and civil liberties. The study's authors say the re-election of Bush would give U.S. courts a strong rightward tilt that could last for years.

Here's the details:

Carp along with Kenneth Manning of the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and Ronald Stidham from Appalachian State University looked at federal court decisions in the Federal Supplement's database of 70,000 cases and categorized them as "liberal" or "conservative" based on case content.

They found that Republican appointees issued liberal rulings in about a third of their cases while Democrats did so 45 percent to 50 percent of the time. But in civil rights and civil liberties cases -- abortion, gay rights, freedom of speech, right to privacy, race relations, for example -- Bush judges made liberal decisions only 26.5 percent of the time.

[A big thanks to Hamster for finding this article.]

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