Talk:List of presidents of the United States by judicial appointments

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Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:List of Vice Presidents of the United States which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 23:02, 21 May 2018 (UTC)

Weeks column
In retrospect, I agree with the IP who initially reverted the addition that we need to discuss the matter before adding a column for number of weeks the appointing president was in office. BD2412 T 22:55, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

I personally don’t like the weeks column, and I agree that it needs to be discussed here before being implemented. I think at most there could be a number of terms column. But I’ve never seen any article anywhere discussing presidents by number of weeks in office. Dlambe3 (talk) 08:17, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Hey there, thanks for opening the discussion. When I checked and didn't see any previous discussion of this kind of thing, I considered starting a talk section but then figured this fell under WP:BOLD, and (per that page) if folks didn't like it they could revert it and kick it to the talk page. And so here we are! I see two main questions at hand here, I'll give my thoughts on both, glad to hear what others think.


 * Is having a column for time in office useful?
 * Clearly I think this is a yes. The amount of time a president is in office has a significant affect on the number of judges they're able to appoint, so I think it's useful context to have when comparing across history. To give some concrete examples: four presidents nominated zero supreme court judges: Harrison, Taylor, Johnson, and Carter. For the first two that's not surprising, as their terms were unusually short: Harrison died after a month, Taylor after a year. The other two, however, had full (or nearly full) 4-year terms, and their lack of appointments is more surprising. On the other end, FDR got 9 appointments, but that's not surprising because he also served more than three full terms. But the next on the list, Taft, got 6 appointments despite only serving one term - very unusual! On both ends, the length of the term is important context to understand the total number of appointments. And of course, the timing is not a coincidence - I came to this page looking to find out how many presidents historically had 3 supreme court nominations in a single term, and that information was not readily available. With the term length column, it's easy to see that 3 nominations in a single term is a little more than average, but not unheard of.


 * Is weeks the proper metric for length of term?
 * I don't have as strong an opinion here. "Terms" or "years" are the obvious choices, but then you end up with Harrison serving 0.08 years or 0.02 terms, which seemed awkward to me. The alternatives are months, weeks, or days - months are an inconsistent length, number of days seemed too large, weeks seemed a happy medium. For reference: FDR served 12.08 years, 4.02 terms, 145 months, 630 weeks, or 4400+ days. Harrison served 0.08 years, 0.02 terms, (just barely) 1 month, 4 weeks, 31 days. I'm happy to go with whatever the consensus is here.

In short: I think time in office is an important piece of context to have alongside things like number of judicial appointments, since time in office varies quite a bit, and is directly related to opportunity to make appointments. I don't particularly care how it's expressed, weeks just seemed a happy medium to me. The Human Spellchecker (talk) 04:58, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Are there 677 or 678 Article III federal district court judgeships?
This article makes mention of 677 Article III federal district court judgeships. However, I have also seen the number 678 passed around. And the article that actually details the U.S. federal district court sizes (excluding the Article IV ones) adds up to 678. Also, this source from the "United States district court" article:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100516193815/http://www.uscourts.gov/JudgesAndJudgeships/FederalJudgeships.aspx

Which one is it? And why the discrepancy? 173.63.14.128 (talk) 09:18, 9 June 2021 (UTC)