President Barack Obama has nominated Los Angeles lawyer and UC Berkeley alumnus Paul Watford to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Watford, an Orange County native, served as a clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski, who is now chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, as well as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after receiving a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and a law degree from UCLA.
“I think it is a great nomination,” said Jeremy Rosen, colleague and friend of Watford and a partner at the Los Angeles law firm Horvitz and Levy. “I feel Paul will be a great judge. He is extraordinarily bright and has great insight.”
Watford is currently an appellate litigation partner at the law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson LLP in Los Angeles, Calif., where he has worked since 2001.
According to David Madden, assistant circuit executive for the court, the Ninth Circuit is the largest appeals court in terms of geographic area, the number of judges on the court and the case load, which is almost 12,000 cases a year.
The court has authorized 29 judges. However, there are currently only 24 active judges making rulings due to a backlog of nominations.
The addition of Watford brings the total number of pending Obama nominations to three. Obama’s first nomination to the Ninth Circuit — UC Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu — was held up for more than a year by political infighting in the U.S. Senate. Liu has since withdrawn his nomination and was appointed and quickly confirmed to the California Supreme Court by Gov. Jerry Brown.
“The backlog is long standing and is having an impact in the court,” Madden said. “It causes a hardship for the judges who are forced to take on a heavier workload.”
If confirmed, Watford would fill the vacancy created by the death of Judge Pamela Rymer, who died from cancer in September. He would be the second African American to sit on the current court, according to Madden.
“He always struck me as very smart, soft-spoken and effective,” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor who has known Watford for nearly 20 years. “Paul has the temperament to be an appellate judge — he is calm, dispassionate, respectful of colleagues and of the law.”
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November 2012 is coming and let’s hope. a tidal wave of Constitution loving, NON-activist judges!
check out Volokh’s blog, where he has further comments on Watford:
http://volokh.com/2011/10/18/paul-watford-nominated-to-the-ninth-circuit/
Of course, Paul was nominated by President Obama, and I expect that if
he is confirmed he will likely sign some opinions that I’ll disagree
with. (He’ll also sign plenty of opinions that I’ll agree with; the
bulk of a circuit judge’s work has to do with technical areas of the law
where legal knowledge, careful craftsmanship, and a willingness to
follow precedent are much more important than one’s views about the
law.) But Obama is the President, and moderate libertarianish
conservatives like me can’t expect nominees who’ll see things quite the
ways we do. If we want such nominees, we need to first win the
election, and we didn’t win that one.