Judicial Appointments and COVID

Political survivors do not let crises go to waste. This is especially true with regards to judicial appointments, which have gained salience as judges have become catalysts of social change by ruling on controversial issues like climate change, minority rights, and corruption. Hence the question: will the COVID crisis wash over the politics of judicial appointments, or will political elites use it to create the magistracy that they want? This paper investigates judicial appointments during COVID by analysing changes in the monthly employment rolls of Romanian judges, which let us see, month to month, who entered the profession, who was promoted, and who retired. These dynamics in the occupational mobility of judges are then doubly compared, first to the mobility of judges during another period of crisis (the Great Recession) and second to the COVID occupational mobility of a similar legal profession, prosecutors. This paper's contributions are two-fold. On a practical level, it introduces an automated data-collection pipeline (available on github) which collects, cleans, and incorporates into existing data sets state-generated digital archives, updating descriptive statistics and more complex model output in real time. This allows researchers and the public to better track state reactions to COVID. More broadly, it investigates how a fundamental function of the modern state (exercising legitimate authority through public investigation and judgement) is affected by short-term crises.