Presidents often move quite slowly to exercise their important power of judicial appointment. This study attempts to explain these delays by developing a strategic conception of the timing of presidential nominations to the lower federal courts. We argue that the judicial selection process may be best conceptualized by viewing presidents as strategic actors who prefer to select judges with policy preferences that are as close as possible to those of the president, given senatorial and temporal constraints. We test our argument by estimating a duration model of the length of time between vacancy and nomination for all vacancies in the U.S. District Courts and U.S. Courts of Appeals from 1977 to 1999. Our results indicate that the timing of presidential nominations is a function of both politics and institutional constraint.