Published March 24, 2025
Chief Judge Diane Sykes stepping down from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, this leaves a hole on the court’s right flank. This is a court that has whipsawed ideologically. During Obama it leaned a little left with Richard Posner and John Tinder — later just Posner — occupying the middle of the en banc court. Trump reinforced it, though, adding Michael Brennan and Amy Barrett (later Thomas Kirsch) on the right while replacing the erratic Posner and liberal Ann Claire Williams with Michael Scudder and Amy St. Eve.
Unfortunately, on the right, Joel Flaum and Michael Kanne couldn’t bring themselves to leave under Trump — Kanne because he was feuding over a replacement, and Flaum, it seems, because he liked being a senior-statesman judge. They were replaced with leftist Candace Jackson-Akiwumi and the Indiana magistrate judge Joshua Kolar. At the same time the liberal Diane Wood was replaced with the liberal John Lee, the liberal Ilana Rovner with the leftist Nancy Maldonado, and the liberal David Hamilton with the moderate Doris Pryor.
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Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture Program, where he writes and speaks on issues relating to the law, the federal judiciary, and Congress. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: Per Curiam, and elsewhere.
