74 Am. U. L. Rev. 953 (2025).

Abstract

Should more judges have technical and scientific educations than are currently prevalent in the federal judiciary? This empirical study of the educational background of federal judges reports the undergraduate and graduate majors of active U.S. federal Article III judges. Information on the subject area of study is largely not publicly available, especially for judges appointed decades ago. This is the first and only publicly available research study of the subject areas of study of U.S. judges, collected via phone and email surveys to U.S. judges. The results of this study show that only 7.35% of federal judges have majors in science and technology fields. Although science and technology education can come from many areas of life, the lack of formal education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics among federal judges is worthy of critical examination.

This Article also discusses whether and in what circumstances judges might benefit from formal scientific training and what solutions could be implemented to improve the court’s ability to understand and fairly rule on highly technical matters such as patent cases, criminal cases requiring evaluation of scientific evidence, or environmental law cases. This Article also recommends that at all levels, especially in district courts handling complex scientific cases, more judges should be appointed who have scientific training. More scientific training programs like the former Science for Judges program should he provided, ideally by nonpartisan groups. This Article also explores countervailing considerations that a push for judges with formal scientific education could negatively affect trends of gender and racial diversity in the federal judiciary, could result in industry capture or over-specialization, or could mean insufficient training in other equally important educational backgrounds in the social sciences and humanities.

* Assistant Professor of Law, Cleveland State University College of Law, J.D., George Washington University School of Law, B.S. in biochemistry, Arizona State University. Professor Laser is a member of the patent bar of the USPTO. She practiced for nine years at the law firms Kirkland & Ellis LLP and WilmerHale in the intellectual property litigation groups. The Author thanks the dedicated work of her research assistants, Marina Mlinac, Zoe Sapp, Savannah Gordon, and Casey Fisher. The Author also thanks her husband, Christopher Tosswill, for assistance with data aggregation and visualization. The Author also thanks John Duffy and the participants in the 2020 Notre Dame Patent Colloquium, 2024 WIPIP, and 2024 JIPSA Conferences for their helpful suggestions for improvement.