The reality is there is quite a bit of wiggle room in the interpretation of the law. Someone who is conservative and 'tough on crime' may want a judge who is bi

The reality is there is quite a bit of wiggle room in the interpretation of the law. Someone who is conservative and 'tough on crime' may want a judge who is biased toward stricter prison sentences. Someone who is more liberal may want a judge who shows more leniency and is biased toward finding other ways to rehabilitate the guilty. Its kind of like how two competent people can implement a POSIX compliant operating system in different ways (microkernel or monolithic, emacs vs vi, systemd vs sysvinit).