Research- Coauthored

Projects listed below are ongoing. For recent drafts, please contact me at lamattio@bu.edu

For information on my ongoing solo-authored projects, please click here

“Independent Justice? U.S. Attorneys as a Case Study of Political Appointments”
With Associate Professor Jen Selin, Arizona State University, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law
Forthcoming in Journal of Law Reform

Concerns over presidential use of federal prosecution as a political weapon and the overall independence of the Department of Justice have increased in recent years. While most scholarship exploring the potential for political prosecution has focused on the legal and political forces that influence prosecutorial discretion, few studies have identified the varying ways that federal prosecutors obtain their jobs or how those processes affect who serves as
U.S. Attorney. This is a consequential oversight, as U.S. Attorney appointments provide an informative case study of the legal frameworks, historical conventions, and politics that influence presidential appointments more generally.

In this Article, we illustrate how historical battles across different branches of government for control of federal prosecution have resulted in legal frameworks that provide for at least seven different U.S. Attorney appointment mechanisms. We then provide both qualitative examples and quantitative analysis of U.S. Attorney appointments from 1970 to 2022 to evaluate whether U.S. Attorneys appointed through the “traditional” presidential nomination and Senate confirmation process have different backgrounds and careers than U.S. Attorneys who obtain office through “non-traditional” methods, including appointment by federal district courts.

We find that, like with other political appointees, U.S. Attorneys are increasingly likely to obtain their jobs through “non-traditional” methods. In addition, U.S. Attorneys appointed through these methods differ from their presidentially-nominated and Senate-confirmed counterparts in important ways, including their background experience and what they go on to do after serving in office. While these findings may raise alarm bells for those who worry that presidents increasingly circumvent Senate confirmation of political appointments to further executive control of government, this Article illustrates that “non- traditional” appointments are the result of over two centuries worth of bargaining between the branches over the power of appointment in an effort to prioritize expertise over politics.

“Intentional Vacancies”
With Ilana Keusch, Princeton University

Federal district court judge vacancies may be a consequence of the president’s strategic behavior. Previous studies of judicial nomination strategy have assumed that presidents’ chief aim is to fill vacant seats with delay being attributed to the Senate confirmation process. If this is correct, why do presidents sometimes decline to nominate new judges, even when they enjoy unified government? Building on recent scholarship on vacancies (Kinane, 2021; Hollibaugh, 2015), we develop and test an explanation: presidents deliberately leave a seat vacant when a new judge is unlikely to favorably impact the district’s policy output and the cost to nominate is sufficiently high. If a district court is ideologically distant from the president’s ideal, the costs of finding, vetting, and confirming a nominee outweigh the minimal policy and political gains of a filled vacancy. Filling a vacancy also reduces the relative workload for each district court judge. By maintaining a vacancy in a district with a significant case backlog, presidents can diminish the district’s ideologically distant judges’ effectiveness as policymakers. Data from 1981-2022 confirm that presidents exercise nomination forbearance when vacancies occur in ideologically distant districts, particularly those with burdensome caseloads. We deepen the analysis by considering Senate politics and the temporal proximity of national elections. We conclude that allowing select vacancies to persist is part of an effective president’s judicial nomination strategy.