American Bar Association

By Laura Abel, Deputy Director, National Center for Access to Justice. This piece is cross-posted at NCAJ’s blog.

The Department of Justice has released startling evidence that language barriers are leading to serious injustices in courts in North Carolina. In a March 8 letter, DOJ warned North Carolina that its ongoing failure to provide court interpreters in civil cases, and in some criminal cases, violates the federal Civil Rights Act, which bars courts and other recipients of federal funding from providing worse services to people on the basis of English language ability.  

DOJ reports that prosecutors in Wake and Durham counties ask people with limited English proficiency to plead guilty and then, assuming the role of “interpreters,” convey the guilty pleas to the courts. A judge relying solely on “prosecutorial interpreting” cannot know whether the person is even aware that a guilty plea is being entered, much less whether he understands the charges and consequences. When the federal government then deports the person, it cannot know whether it is deporting an innocent person. 

The quality of justice is equally in doubt in civil cases. In 2010, a mother in Wake County lost permanent custody of her children after a trial in which she struggled to understand basic facts because she had limited command of the English language. Although she told the judge about her language difficulty, the court provided no interpreter. She also had no lawyer to help. Communication was so poor that at the end of the case she did not even understand that the judge’s ruling would cause her to lose her children.

by Nicole Flatow

Last week, The New York Times revealed that a disproportionate number of President Obama’s minority and female judicial nominees were rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. Out of the 14 nominees that received the rating, just one was a white male.

American Constitution Society Board Member Robert Raben, the president of The Raben Group, called the story “at least welcome, at most desperately needed” in a guest post for ACSblog. Transparency is needed, he explains, to root out practices or biases that may explain “why minorities more than whites seem to crash on the establishment shoals.”

“I have not seen a single Latina nominee who wasn't either hit or slammed by some establishment group -- a bar association, a leader of a not for profit, a bar leader, a judicial committee -- as being ‘intemperate’; lacking ‘seasoning’; ‘inexperienced’, ‘not that bright’, etc.,” Raben writes. “There's a possibility that the entire cohort of Latina lawyers who want to be federal or state judges just don’t deserve it yet, but I'm not buying it. I think there's something else going on, and I think that unearthing what may be going on within the ABA's cloistered process may help us get to the bottom of this.”

In The Daily Beast, University of Colorado at Boulder law professor Paul Campos addresses claims by the right that Obama’s picks were rated “not qualified” at a higher rate than Bush’s or Clinton’s because Obama prioritized affirmative action over merit. Campos provides evidence that “the Bush administration engaged in more aggressive affirmative action when it came to nominating federal judges than the Obama administration has,” given the smaller pool of conservative minority candidates.

Instead, there is another “quite simple” explanation for the higher number of Obama candidates rated “not qualified”, Campos writes: