Replication data for: On Tournaments for Appointing Great Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court

In "An Empirical Ranking of Judicial Performance" (S. Cal. L. Rev. (2004)), Professors Steven Choi and Mitu Gulati are ambitious: They seek to quantify great legal minds. This interesting endeavor has both descriptive and normative components: Choi and Gulati hope not only to offer objective measures of what makes a judge great but also to impact the choices that presidents and senators make when appointing individuals to the U.S. Supreme Court. Their procedures---which entail running the names of judges through various judicial tournaments---lead the authors to advocate a handful of well-known federal appellate judges for nomination to the high court. Although Professors Choi and Gulati have unequivocally started a useful dialogue, we argue that their approach is so fraught with faulty assumptions and imperfect measures that to replace the current nomination procedures with the authors' tournament could lead to a series of harms that, in our view, may very well be serious than those we face under the existing system. In this article, we describe the drawbacks as we see them, and note that while the authors could readily fix so me of the defects, others are inherent to the tournament and thus could not be remedied without rejecting the approach altogether.