Legal News

Here Come the Judges: Obama Nominates Two for Appellate Bench

By Ashby Jones

President Obama has made it official: Earlier Thursday, he nominated two new appellate-court judges to the bench. According to reports just out, he plans to nominate Maryland federal judge Andre Davis to fill a vacancy on the Virginia-based Fourth Circuit and Gerard Lynch to fill the lone vacancy on the New York-based Second Circuit. Click here for the AP story, here for the early account from Legal Times. We mentioned both of them in this post from a few weeks back.

Confirmation of Judge Davis would give the Fourth Circuit six Democratic-appointed and six Republican-named judges, leaving three vacancies. Approval of Gerald Lynch would give the court seven Democratic and six Republican judges.

“Judges Lynch and Davis are two jurists with exceptional records of integrity and fairness,” Obama said in a statement. “They will be voices of reason and evenhandedness on the Second and Fourth Circuits.”

Since 1995, Andre Davis (UPenn, Maryland Law) has been serving as a federal district court judge in Baltimore. Before that, he served as a state judge in Baltimore and taught at the University of Maryland Law School. He clerked for district judge Frank Kaufman, and then for Fourth Circuit judge Francis Murnaghan, Jr.

Gerald Lynch is currently serving as a district judge in Manhattan. He holds an endowed chair at Columbia Law School has, throughout his career, served in a wide variety of government positions. He also seems to have figured out the fine art of being a student. According to the White House press release: “After graduating first in his class from Regis High School, a Jesuit school in New York, he received his B.A. from Columbia in 1972, where he was valedictorian. He received his J.D. from Columbia in 1975, again graduating first in his class.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Lynch snagged a couple of elite clerkships: working first for the Second Circuit’s Wilfred Feinberg and later for Supreme Court Justice William Brennan.

So how will Senate Republicans greet these nominations? It’s too early to tell; the Senate Judiciary Committee will not vote on the nomination for several weeks. A hint could come from the AP story: “with Republicans complaining of inadequate preparation time, the hearing signaled a rocky beginning to Obama’s attempt to remake the federal judiciary.”

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated Lynch’s first name as Gerald.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 02, 2009 (boomark / email).