[JURIST] US Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland [WH materials] on Tuesday provided Congress with a questionnaire [text, PDF] detailing his judicial qualifications. This was the most thorough record of judicial qualifications submitted for a Supreme Court nominee, with the questionnaire totaling 141-pages and a 2,066-page appendix. In response to a question asking Garland to describe the times where his opinion had been reversed, he responded that “[n]one of the opinions [he has] authored ha[ve] been reversed, either by the Supreme Court of the United States or by the District of Columbia Circuit sitting en banc,” although some cases for which he was on panel but not the author had been reversed.

US President Barack Obama [official website] nominated [JURIST report] Garland, Chief Judge of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [official website] to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia [JURIST report] on the US Supreme Court in March. Garland was appointed to the DC Circuit in 1997 by Bill Clinton and became Chief Judge in February 2013. Republican senators have pledged to block any nomination by Obama, arguing that since it is an election year, the American people should have a say [SCOTUSblog op-ed] in the process by voting in the upcoming presidential election.