By Neela Eyunni, LAW WEEK COLORADO
DENVER—An advisory committee created in April to help select candidates for two vacant Colorado federal judgeships has completed its work, but it is keeping its recommendations secret.
Former Colorado Supreme Court Justice Rebecca Love Kourlis, committee co-chair, said the panel agreed to “complete confidentiality” and is unable to release the names of those it put on a short list for consideration by Colorado Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, both Democrats.
In an e-mail to Law Week Colorado, Kourlis did not indicate whether the confidentiality extended to the senators, the candidates, or both.
The job of picking the finalists for President Barack Obama’s consideration falls to Udall and Bennet, who have not revealed the short-listed names.
Udall has interviewed some of the candidates this month and will continue over the next two weeks, his spokeswoman Tara Trujillo said. Trujillo, however, declined to give details about the candidates being considered.
“The information is not public at this time, and we will announce the final candidates when the process is complete,” she said.
Bennet’s office did not return phone calls seeking comment.
One Denver lawyer who sat on a similar vacancy committee last year, Frances Koncilja, said then-Sen. Ken Salazar also did not release the names of the nine candidates her committee sent to him for two vacancies on the U.S. District Court for Colorado.
However, Koncilja said that has not always been standard procedure.
“I think that in the past some of the commissions or the senators have released all the names,” she said. “There is no ‘one size fits all.’ ”
While confidentiality when it comes to selecting federal judges for Colorado is nothing new, Koncilja said it may not be the best policy.
“I am personally a believer in transparency, and I personally believe that when a commission recommends names, they ought to be made public because I think at that point you will find a lot of community input can get generated,” she said.
Similar panels, such as Colorado Supreme Court and Appeals Court nominating commission, are required by statute to release the names of candidates to the public, Koncilja said.
The Kourlis advisory panel has reviewed 37 applications and interviewed the top 20, according to Trujillo.
Applicants have been equally as tight-lipped about the process.
David Powell, a partner Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, said he applied for the position but declined to comment further on if the senators interviewed him.
Colorado U.S. attorney nominee John Walsh also said he had put his name in the hat for the federal judgeship during a previous interview with Law Week Colorado, but was unavailable for comment on his current status.

Distributed by Colorado Capitol Reporters