The California La Raza Lawyers Association has been a frequent burr in the governor’s judicial appointments side, publicly cajoling, pushing and needling him to name more minorities to the bench.
Now, the organization’s members charge, the governor appears to be retaliating for all that effort. Maribel Medina, the group’s judicial chairwoman, says that not only did the governor not appoint a Latino in his latest round of 13 appointments last month, he’s hasn’t picked a candidate endorsed by La Raza Lawyers in almost three years.
“To have 100 percent of those individuals not appointed, we’re concerned that if you’re a member of La Raza Lawyers, you’re blacklisted,” Medina said.
Two nominees for the federal bench in the Bay Area got through the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today, but not before Republicans lined up solidly against one of them.
While San Jose-based Magistrate Judge Richard Seeborg sailed through on a voice vote, his colleague from San Francisco, Edward Chen, got through on a party line 12-7 tally. Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions of Alabama criticized Chen for his some of his writings and speeches, along with his long tenure as an ACLU staffer. An “ACLU chromosome” runs through President Obama’s judicial nominees, Sessions declared, prompting loud groans from Chairman Patrick Leahy and other Democrats.
Over on Cal Law, Zusha Elinson has done an interesting profile of Judy O’Brien. While she’s now the general counsel for a startup whose ideas for cell-phone banking could make a huge difference to the developing world, she might be more notable in local legal circles as the first woman to make partner at Wilson Sonsini.
Presented here are some video extracts from Zusha’s interview as O’Brien discusses what it was like, in the early eighties, to write Wilson’s maternity leave policy there would be one in time for her to deliver her first child, and about how joining an all-boys club required her to learn to swear like the boys.
About 3:44 into it, she starts describing closing deals in Japan, maybe the only place where a female lawyer had even more of an uphill climb. And how many deals have you closed over pizza in your own kitchen? Then around the 7:50 mark, she offers advice — the lessons she learned forging a path 25 years ago. Unfortunately, the lessons do not include how to ever get a good night’s sleep.
This is the longest video we’ve ever done in connection with a story, but as a first-person account of a transitional time in the legal profession, we thought it was worth preserving.
Arcelia Hurtado knows it will take a lot of energy to tackle the financial constraints facing Equal Rights Advocates, where she takes over Sept. 1 as executive director. But the 38-year-old is no stranger to penny counting.
She comes to the position from the San Francisco state public defender’s office, where she was an apellate attorney. “At the state level, we were experiencing a lot of furloughs and budget cuts,” Hurtado, pictured at left, told Legal Pad this afternoon.
The guv, left, with the chief justice (not on our list).
We recently put together some stats on the governor’s judicial picks for an Exhibits feature page on CalLaw.com, which broke out stats on things like party affiliation and gender. In the process, we put together a huge (downloadable) spreadsheet that we thought might be of interest to other court watchers, now that we’re done with it. So we're sharing it, after the jump. Save it! Sort it! Add to it!
Plus, we'll add some more stats and demographic info — both official and unofficial — that we didn’t get to incorporate in Exhibits. Feeder jobs! Appellate seats filled! Ethnic minority numbers!
All that the judicial wonks out there are hoping for, and more, after the jump …
The number of would-be judges labeled “not qualified” by the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation last year dropped by more than 50 percent from 2007, according to figures released by the State Bar late Monday.
Just 15 of 259 applicants received the dreaded “not qualified” rating. Thirty-three received the label in 2007.
The JNE numbers detail the cumulative gender and ethnicities of lawyers applying for judgeships in 2008. They also break down the applicants’ ratings – extremely well qualified, well qualified, qualified and not qualified -- by gender and ethnic subgroups.
State law requires JNE to release the data annually. The Judicial Council and the governor’s office released similar figures on judicial applicants and appointments earlier this week.
This year’s JNE numbers are in the chart at right — click to enlarge.
Here’s a curious bit of judicial diversity news: In a report (.pdf) issued Friday, the Judicial Council reports that the number of minority judges has increased over the last two years. But oddly, so have the number of Caucasians.
African-American, Asian American and Latino jurists now comprise 16.8 percent of the bench in California, up from 15.1 percent in 2007. But the percentage of white judges has also increased from 70.1 percent two years ago to 72.6 percent today.
So what gives? The answer appears to lie in the decreasing number of judges who don’t provide information about their race to the Council. The percentage of such racial decline-to-states dropped from 9.9 percent in 2007 to 5.3 percent this year.
The council’s report follows a similar one that the governor issued about his 2008 appointments on Thursday. A third analysis by the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation is expected Monday.
The number of lawyers applying for judgeships in California last year dropped 37 percent from 2007, according to numbers released today by the governor’s office.
Just 262 attorneys submitted applications in 2008, down from 414 the year before and 325 in 2007. Rachel Cameron, a spokeswoman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said no one is sure why the numbers fell.
“We don’t have one particular thing we can point to one way or another,” Cameron said.
Only white guys still apply. All kinds of blame, after the jump.
Hey, it was just a little motion to intervene. So what was all the fuss?
Not one, not two, but three judges in San Francisco Superior Court either recused themselves or were asked to step aside by counsel on Wednesday during a hearing in a case over bar exam data.
Maybe it’s the nature of the case? UCLA law prof Richard Sander wants to examine State Bar data for proof that affirmative action doesn’t work. After his previous study suggested affirmative action might be responsible for black students’ high bar-exam failure rates nationwide, his premise is that race-based preferences opened doors of elite law schools to minority students who weren’t academically prepared and might have prospered at less prestigious law schools.
Yeah, that’s going to tick some people off.
Some ticked-off people, and recuse excuses, after the jump:
Bloggers go crazy over Apple, and inevitably these Mac-crazies get everything wrong about every lawsuit their beloved company is involved in.
The fight between Apple and Mac knockoff company Psystar has provided a nice blooper reel: “Apple and Psystar to settle out of court” blared TechSpot’s headline in late October – well…not really, it was just a mandatory ADR session common to most any case.
So Legal Pad can’t wait for the bloggers to get wind of the Apple’s win today. The dispute centers around whether Psystar can sell its cheap computers loaded with Mac’s operating systems. Apple claims it’s a copyright violation, while Psystar claims that Apple is cornering the market on Mac software by only allowing it to be used on Macs.
Does Toyota have an unfair hold on the market for Toyotas? Not answered, after the jump:
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