President-elect Barack Obama appears to be on track to re-professionalize the justice department, Oregon State University professor Bill Lunch said Wednesday.

“All signals from Obama are that he values very professional qualifications,” Lunch said in an interview with PolitickerOR.com. “He was a law professor at the University of Chicago and the editor of the Harvard Law Review. I’m sure he knows extremely capable people all over the country.”

Valuing professional qualifications would seem to be good news for all of the potential candidates to be Oregon’s next U.S. attorney. 

Lunch said the re-professionalization of the U.S. attorney’s office would mirror appointments to the office during the 1970s, when the office went to candidates. But in recent decades, that pattern has started to change. Lunch said that after President Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, U.S. attorney appointments began going to the president’s former law school classmates and colleagues he worked with early in his career.

The most recent significant change in U.S. attorney appointments occurred under President George W. Bush. Lunch said the U.S. attorney positions were given to more conservative party activists. After the current president was re-elected in 2004, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales began to make sure that everyone in the U.S. attorney’s office was in line with the White House ideology.

“White house staffers wanted to get rid of anyone who wasn’t a conservative Republican,” Lunch said. “The Bush Administration succeeded in using the position as a political and ideological post, but they’ve gotten themselves in a bit of trouble for doing so.”

This included Washington’s former U.S. Attorney John McKay, who was one of eight U.S. attorneys dismissed in 2006. The reasons for McKay’s dismissal are still unclear, and range from allegedly not following up on Republican Party requests to investigate voter fraud in the 2004 governor’s race, where current Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire won a bitterly contested race, to being too aggressive in the pursuit of an investigation involving a murdered assistant U.S. attorney based in Seattle.

Lunch said that despite the U.S. attorney scandal in recent years, Obama probably won’t be limited in the way he can pick the next U.S. attorneys. Judging by the way Obama has drafted his initial cabinet appointments, he is a president that focuses more on experience than on ideology or personal relations. It bodes well for the office, Lunch said. In Oregon, he also has the benefit of senior U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Portland) to help him with the state’s next pick.

But, he added, with Obama being a former constitutional law professor and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, he still had plenty of personal connections in the legal community that he could draw on for his next appointment.

“The U.S. attorney position has traditionally been a political job. They represent the administration among the law enforcement circles and the legal community,” Lunch said. “Generally speaking, people who end up as U.S. attorneys have good political connections to the party that has taken power.”