Supreme Court confirmation is an exhaustively studied phenomenon, but lower court confirmation is less well understood, in part because lower court nominees are very rarely rejected, and the Senate fails even to hold a recorded vote for most appointees. However, the length of time it takes to fill a judicial vacancy serves as alternate evidence of conflict between the president and the Senate. We present an empirical assessment of appellate vacancy conflict, based on a continuous time-proportional hazard model of vacancy duration. Our results demonstrate that female and minority candidates are confirmed only after unusually long vacancies, and this has nothing to do with the qualifications of the nominees. Our results also demonstrate that institutional and partisan conflict between the Senate and the White House drive the confirmation process for the federal appeals courts, but delay tactics employed by the Senate are only partially strategic. PARTISANSHIP AND CONFIRMATION DELAY

Leaching of radionuclides produced in soil and rock by high energy proton-induced radiation was studied for the SSC site. Comparison was made with predictions of a Monte Carlo code CASIM and previous results for the Fermilab site. The principal long-lived radionuclides were 3H and 22Na in agreement with Fermilab results. A few other radionuclides were present at lower concentrations in a subset of the samples. For example, 134Cs was detected in a few SSC water samples. Leaching from SSC chalk was dependent on previous weathering and on leaching time. The more soil-like marl and shale were leached more rapidly. Results of this study, in conjunction with the SSC groundwater model, show that adequate groundwater protection would have been maintained for an accidental loss of the entire proton beam at a point in the SSC Collider tunnel. Early warning techniques developed are directly applicable to soil activation monitoring at other facilities.