Academics making inaccurate claims about confirmation rates of judges

Michael Gerhardt at William & Mary Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky at Duke Law School had an amazine piece in the Los Angeles Times where they claim among other things that President George W. Bush has "the highest success rate ever for a president's judicial nominations." An e-mail that I received from Gerhardt noted that despite the claims made in the op-ed they calculated the confirmation rate "by looking at the number confirmed of those reaching the Senate floor." Thus by dropping out the nominees who had problems (from filibusters to nominations that never made it through committee when the Democrats controlled the Senate), there are apparently few problems. Even with this carefully selected data, they ignore recent administrations such as for Carter or Reagan's first term.