Editorial: Looking to divvy up 9th Circuit

A federal commission investigating whether the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should be broken up decided last week that breaking up is hard to do. But the commission did agree that the 9th Circuit's 28 judges should be subdivided into three parts.

What does this mean for Nevada? Under the plan Nevada would be placed with Hawaii, the Pacific islands and central and northern California. The Sun's Bill Gang reported that the nine or 10 judges in this group would include two from Nevada.

Each case appealed to the 9th Circuit is assigned to a three-judge panel at random. Since there would be a smaller number of judges in Nevada's division, the odds would be pretty good that a Nevada judge would be selected on a case arising from this state, according to UNLV law school professor Carl Tobias.

While this might seem like good news for Nevada, as always the devil is in the details, and this is no exception. One concern is that Nevada would be grouped with states with which it has little in common. A more reasonable accommodation would have been a grouping with states such as Utah, Arizona and Idaho. Although the possibility may be better under the Hawaii-California grouping that a Nevada judge would be involved in a case than exists now, the fact that the other judges come from states that bear little resemblance to Nevada is troubling.

It will be interesting to see the reaction from federal lawmakers representing states in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. They have fought to split up the 9th Circuit because the powerful timber and mining industries objected to the appeals court's rulings, saying they were too liberal. To stave off this attack on the judiciary a compromise was reached, creating the federal commission to look at the 9th Circuit's structure.

The bottom line is that the Republican injection of partisan politics into the 9th Circuit has been disastrous. The legislative branch has no business meddling with the affairs of the judicial branch simply because some big contributors to Republicans had their oxen gored in some controversial decisions.

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