Federal judiciary has 'an empathy gap,' Professor Tang tells Here & Now
Professor Aaron Tang appeared on the public radio program Here & Now to discuss President Joe Biden’s efforts to explore ways to reform and diversify the federal judiciary, which is currently overwhelmingly white and male.
“There is an empathy gap in the federal judiciary right now,” Tang told David Freudberg of the program Humankind, which created the report aired by Here & Now. “There is all sorts of social science research showing we are predisposed for subconscious reasons as human beings to listen more closely to people who look like us,” Tang said. The lack of diversity on the federal bench includes judges’ educational and professional backgrounds, he said. “It is not a good thing that we have all elite lawyers from elite law schools who have stocked the federal courts.”
Aaron Tang's teaching and research interests include constitutional law, education law, federal courts, labor law, and the intersections among civil litigation, the political process and public policy more broadly. A graduate of Stanford Law School, he has clerked for Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court. His scholarly articles have appeared in law journals such as the Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Virginia Law Review, George Washington Law Review, and Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.