The NYTimes reports: “Justice Department officials over the last six years illegally used ‘political or ideological’ factors to hire new lawyers into an elite recruitment program, tapping law school graduates with conservative credentials over those with liberal-sounding resumes, a new report found Tuesday.”
From a quick skim of the report, it seems that the DOJ changed its hiring process for its Honors Program and Summer Law Intern Program in 2002 so that the programs could better compete with higher-paying law firm jobs for the highest-quality candidates. These changes involved more Department officials – including political appointees, rather than career attorneys – in the hiring for the Honors Program and SLIP. Individual DOJ components would select candidates from their applicant pools, and a Screening Committee would review the candidates for final approval. Between 2003 and 2005, the Office of Attorney Recruitment and Management (OARM) received a few, but not many, complaints about the process or decisions of the Screening Committee. But in 2006, the Screening Committee rejected, or “deselected,” an unusually large number of applicants to the Honors Program and SLIP, and took 2 weeks, instead of 2 days, for its review. The OARM got many more complaints, and DOJ changed its hiring process in response.
You can see the data in the report for yourself. Based on the 2002 data, candidates with apparent Democratic Party or liberal affiliations were deselected at a significantly higher rate than candidates with Republican Party, conservative, or neutral affiliations. But, there was no other evidence that the Screening Committee intentionally considered these affiliations in their decisions. The report didn’t find evidence that Screening Committees from 2003 to 2005 used political or ideological affiliations as a basis to accept or reject candidates: the deselection decisions could reasonably be explained by class rank, grades, and law school tier.
2006 is a different story. Not only did the data demonstrate that the Screening Committee inappropriately used political or ideological affiliations to approve or reject candidates, but also there were some significant complaints from within the DOJ’s components about the number and types of candidates being deselected. The complaints were made public in a letter from “A Group of Concerned Department of Justice Employees” to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. I’d like to summarize the report’s conclusions here, but there’s just too much information, and if you’re interested I highly recommend reading the report (Section III-D).
This is all sort of old news, because in 2007 DOJ again changed their hiring policies. Now, the screening process is conducted by career employees instead of political appointees, and the selection criteria is officially limited to “merit-based” criteria. I’m sure it’s cold comfort to the qualified but rejected candidates in the 2006 selection process who had their hearts set on working for DOJ (though they probably didn’t have trouble finding work elsewhere). I can only hope that the bad publicity generated by this report will deter DOJ officials – under any administration – from pulling the same sort of tricks in the future. (Hat tip: Above the Law.)
PS: For what it’s worth, upon closer reading it’s pretty clear that one of the Selection Committee members – the one who resigned from DOJ and refused to be interviewed for the report – is the designated fall guy (or, in this case, girl). Though if it’s true that she did cross off applicants because they had “activist” judicial views or were members of “lefty” organizations, I’m sure glad she’s gone.
PPS: Also, keep in mind that the deselected candidates were rejected before they were interviewed, solely based on their paper applications. I think this makes a big difference, but you might disagree.
