The Senate Judiciary Committee approved eight federal court nominees today, including nominee to the Third Circuit Stephanos Bibas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Professor Bibas is a former law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy and to Judge Patrick Higginbotham of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. He also served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York.
Opposition to his nomination has largely focused on his lack of judicial experience and on a paper Professor Bibas wrote but never published, which advocated for certain crimes to be punished by “non-disfiguring corporal punishment.” In response to the Committee’s written questions on the topic, Professor Bibas said he “workshopped” the paper during the summer of 2009 and decided not to seek publication of the paper after seeing that corporal punishment is “wrong and deeply offensive.” He pointed to feedback from a Yale Law professor who informed him of the role of corporal punishment to Jim Crow and slavery.
Professor Bibas’ nomination will move to the full Senate, likely as soon as next week, where he is nearly certain to be confirmed due to the Republicans’ control of that chamber.
