Bench Watcher

DiRK OLIN '81 holds the judicial branch accountable.

Jacko alum Olin initially teetered on the brink of a comedy career, cofounding the National Association of College Humor Magazines before his comic sensibility was overcome by a "wonky streak," as he calls it. "It was the early 1980s and I felt then, and I still feel, that honorable political debate had given way to a reactionary nastiness," says the English major who earned a master's in journalism from Northwestern. "And without sounding too Pollyannish about it, I thought that aspiring toward intellectually honest journalism was a way to contribute to resetting the social and political clock."

After stints at The New Republic and covering Congress for the St. Petersburg Times, Olin ran a couple of legal publications. (He continues to be a frequent contributor to these pages, most recently profiling Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand '88 in Nov/Dec 2007.) He eventually became the founding editor of law. comand in 2005 started the Institute for Judicial Studies. The New York City-based think tank began with a seven-figure endowment from a philanthropist who requested anonymity (but who contractually gave Olin total editorial control), and the primary revenue stream comes from sales of detailed judicial dossiers to litigators. Those litigators are also a primary audience for its investigative journalism Web site, Judicial Reports. com (Olin is editor-in-chief), which is a mix of judicial news and point- of-view pieces about the state of the judiciary.

"What we're doing now is basically looking at judges the way Consumer Reports looks at appliances, because the judiciary at the end of the day is the branch of government that is the least examined, the least understood and the most abused," says Olin, who lives in New Jersey with his wife, Jane, and two daughters. "We knew we'd hit our mark when the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee commissioned our data on the bench metrics of former Southern District Judge Michael Mukasey when he was nominated to the post of U.S. Attorney General."

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