CYNTHIA NANCE: UA law prof faces Senate Judiciary grilling over adverse finding on Trump judicial nominee.

An American Bar Association committee has given rare “not qualified” ratings to two of the 58 people Donald Trump has nominated for federal judgeships, the first such ratings for nominees since 2006.

Those drawing the bad review were Charles Barnes Goodwin, a magistrate nominated for a district court judgeship in Oklahoma and Leonard Steven Grasz, a Nebraska lawyer nominated for the already hopelessly conservative 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that covers Arkansas. The ABA Journal reports here.

The Senate can ignore the ABA ratings.

Cynthia Nance, a law professor and former dean of the University of Arkansas’s law school in Fayetteville, was the lead investigator on the Grasz nomination report. He is strongly supported by Nebraska’s Republican senators.

The National Review, a staunchly conservative publication,  raps Nance for her supposed “ideological bias.”  It prefers its own bias. The article also faulted Nance for having written critically about Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia, saints in the conservative hall of fame. She’s also faulted as an academic, rather than being a practitioner, though she does oversee law students’ work in a legal practice program.

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Here’s the ABA committee’s full statement on the Grasz nomination.

Grasz was faulted by those who weren’t afraid to speak for a lack of commitment to established precedent (particularly Roe v. Wade), for bias and for “gratuitous rudeness.” (Sounds like Neil Gorsuch.) Grasz is deeply political. Half his work, by his own admission, is lobbying.

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Nance has now been called to testify before the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee Nov. 15. I don’t think they plan to give her an award.

I know Cynthia Nance. I believe her.  She did 183 interviews. A second investigator came to the same conclusion (another liberal, sniffs National Review.)

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PS: Only two among hundreds of nominations have received unanimous “not qualified” ratings from the ABA in the last 28 years.