— 3 Possible Supreme Court Nominees —
Nguyen inspired by her family
By Sudhin Thanawala
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Jacqueline Nguyen knows adversity.
She, her siblings and their parents fled Vietnam, and the 10-year-old Nguyen spent her first days in the United States in 1975 in a refugee tent city at Camp Pendleton in California.
Nguyen, 50, says her parents’ perseverance to provide for their six children and start a new life in a foreign country has inspired her to seize opportunities even when they may be difficult or new.
Now a federal appeals court judge, Nguyen may need to summon that inspiration again if President Barack Obama names her as his pick for the U.S. Supreme Court, with a bruising partisan battle looming regardless of the nominee Obama sends to the U.S. Senate. The court is operating with only eight justices since the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last month.
Senators confirmed her nomination by Obama to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2012 by a vote of 91-3, making her the first Asian-American woman to serve as a federal appellate judge. But her record on the 9th Circuit, where she has sided with the circuit’s more liberal judges in several cases, would draw scrutiny from Republicans, said Arthur Hellman, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a scholar on the 9th Circuit.
“There’s a very, very consistent pattern that does say where she stands,” Hellman said.
For example, he cited a 6-5 ruling in 2015 that overturned the Bush administration’s decision to exempt the Tongass National Forest in Alaska from rules that limited road construction and timber harvesting in national forests.
In another 6-5 ruling, Nguyen was among the judges who overturned an Arizona’s man death sentence in 2015 on the grounds that the state wrongly dismissed his post-traumatic stress disorder as a mitigating factor. The ruling said Arizona’s Supreme Court had been making the same underlying mistake for years, opening the door to many potential court challenges from Arizona inmates sent to death row between the late 1980s and 2006.
The decision brought a sharp dissent from Judge Carlos Bea, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. Bea said the decision ignored 9th Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court precedents, brushed aside gruesome crimes and smeared the Arizona Supreme Court.
Nguyen was a federal judge in California when Obama nominated her to the 9th Circuit. She had previously worked as a state judge and a federal prosecutor.
But her work experience had more humble beginnings.
Nguyen has talked about one of her mother’s first jobs peeling, cutting and packing apples and how she would help her with the work late into the night. Nguyen also worked at her family’s doughnut shop in Los Angeles.
Wilkins championed museum
By Jessica Gresko
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — To remind him of some of the work done by potential Supreme Court nominee Robert L. Wilkins, all President Barack Obama has to do is look down the street from the White House to the nearly completed National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Wilkins was instrumental in advocating for the museum, which is set to open in September, quitting his job as a public defender to push for it and later serving on a presidential commission whose work led to its creation.
Now a judge on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Wilkins has credentials that would make him an attractive nominee to fill the Supreme Court seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last month. A native of Muncie, Indiana, who was raised by a single mother, he graduated from Harvard Law School and spent a decade as a public defender in Washington.
As a young lawyer, Wilkins also became known for his role in a landmark lawsuit about racial profiling. The class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union came about after Wilkins and three family members were stopped by a Maryland State Police trooper in 1992 while driving back from his grandfather’s funeral and detained for a search by a drug-sniffing dog.
The state police were accused of using race as a factor in stopping and searching cars. The case was ultimately settled, with the police agreeing to prevent racial profiling and to compile and publish data about traffic highway stops and searches, including the motorists’ race. A follow-up case he was involved in ultimately pushed the state to do even more to combat racial profiling.
“It should not be suspicious to travel on the highway early in the morning in a Virginia rental car. And it should not be suspicious to be black,” Wilkins later said of the incident.
Wilkins was nominated by Obama and unanimously confirmed to the federal trial court in Washington in 2010, but things got tougher when Obama wanted to elevate him to the appeals court. Wilkins and two others were nominated to the District of Columbia Circuit in June 2013, but Republicans initially blocked all three nominees, arguing that the powerful court didn’t have the workload to justify filling three open positions.
Republican resistance so infuriated Democrats that they exercised what’s termed the “nuclear option,” engineering the Senate rules so that only 51, rather than 60, votes were needed to act on the nominations. Wilkins was ultimately confirmed, 55 to 43.
If nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court, Wilkins would be the court’s second sitting black justice, along with Clarence Thomas, and its third ever, after Thurgood Marshall. It would be the first time two black justices have ever sat on the court together.
Watford cited as a moderate judge
By Sudhin Thanawala
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — If Paul Watford were promoted to the U.S. Supreme Court, he’d become the second African-American justice on the current court and its only member without an Ivy League diploma.
Should President Barack Obama look for diversity in a nominee who also has won high marks for his moderation, Watford would fill the bill as a potential replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
The California-educated Watford has been a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for nearly four years. Earlier, he was a federal prosecutor and held clerkships with a Republican-appointed judge and a Supreme Court justice chosen by a Democrat.
“If a candidate were to be evaluated on the merits as opposed to some meta-political issue, I would think there’s a lot about Paul’s intellect and judicial demeanor and his temperament generally that should be appealing to both sides,” said Sean Gallagher, a partner at a Chicago law firm who clerked with Watford for 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski in 1994-95.
Watford has spent nearly four years on the 9th Circuit, where in his opinions and dissents, he appears less interested in making law than resolving disputes, said Arthur Hellman, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and a scholar of the 9th Circuit.
“He’s not playing to any audience,” Hellman said. “He’s not doing it for glory. He’s doing it because he thinks his job requires it.”
Watford was among 10 judges who overruled a smaller 9th Circuit panel last year and said YouTube should not have been forced to take down an anti-Muslim film that sparked violence in the Middle East and death threats to actors. The 10-1 ruling found that the actress who wanted the film removed had no copyright claim to it.
Watford sided with the majority, but said it was wrong to expand the scope of the case to include “new rules of copyright law” and could have decided the issue on much narrower grounds.
“He is someone who is very careful, who decides things very narrowly and somebody who does not use opinions as pedestals for making public policy,” Kozinski said.
In addition to his judicial clerkship with Kozinski, Watford’s path to 9th Circuit judge included a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a stint as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles and a partnership at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson, where his clients included Citigroup and opponents of a 2010 Arizona immigration law who argued only the federal government can regulate immigration. He’s spent much of his life in California, growing up in Orange County and attending the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law.
The U.S. Senate confirmed Watford to the 9th Circuit in a 61-34 vote that included Republican support. If nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court, he would join Justice Clarence Thomas as the second African-American among the current justices.
