Wednesday February 17, 2021

Say it Louder We need more Black women judges. Let’s start with Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Unless you happen to practice law in the District of Columbia, you probably haven’t heard of Ketanji Brown Jackson. That may be about to change — in a big way.

The 50-year-old federal district court judge is a leading contender to take the appeals court seat being vacated by attorney general-designate Merrick Garland. That could be just the first promotion, though.

The federal appeals court in Washington is a frequent steppingstone to a Supreme Court nomination. So any choice for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit matters. Given President Biden’s pledge to name the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, though, Jackson’s elevation would be particularly significant. A graduate of Harvard University and Harvard Law School, she once clerked for Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

One of the high court’s three remaining liberals, Breyer, at 82, may well retire in the next year, and, while it’s hard to phrase this politely, he should: The tragic choice made by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg not to retire during President Barack Obama’s term ought to weigh heavily on Breyer.

Hence the potential significance of Jackson’s elevation to Garland’s seat. To put it bluntly, at least based on the traditional model of choosing justices from among those who have judicial experience, there aren’t very many Black women on the list. There are, astonishingly, just four Black women serving as active judges on the federal appeals courts, and all are over 65.

Another leading possibility is California Supreme Court justice Leondra Kruger, a Yale Law School graduate who edited the Yale Law Journal, clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens and served as principal deputy solicitor general during the Obama administration. And, of course, Biden could look outside the bench, to practicing lawyers or government officials.

Still, Jackson, named to the district court by Obama in 2013, brings to the bench an intriguing — and for the Democratic Party’s restless progressives, attractive — piece of career diversity as well: experience as a public defender.

Read the story on Washington Post

Speaking Of… It’s time to fill the Courts with young, progressive lawyers

Micah J. Schwartzman is a professor of law at the University of Virginia and David Fontana is a professor of law George Washington University.

Since President Biden’s inauguration, more than a dozen federal judges have announced that they plan to take senior status or retire. Total judicial vacancies have grown from 46 to more than 60 (out of nearly 900 seats), and that number is likely to increase substantially over the next few months, as judges who did not want President Donald Trump to replace them vacate their seats. By the end of his term, Trump had appointed nearly a third of all active judges, and now President Biden will have his own chance to reshape the judiciary.

Since Democrats control both the White House and the Senate, and because the filibuster has been abolished for judicial appointments, Biden has significant freedom to choose whom to appoint. Progressive groups have urged him to pick nominees who are diverse in terms of race, gender and professional background — all important goals. But there’s another characteristic that Democrats — unlike Republicans — have long neglected: age.

President Trump maintained his support among mainstream Republicans in part by appointing conservative judges, but his appointments also stand out for their youth. His nominees to the federal courts of appeals, for example — the tier just below the Supreme Court — were the youngest of any president since at least the beginning of the 20th century. According to our calculations, drawing on data compiled from the Federal Judicial Center (the research agency of the U.S. federal courts), his appellate judges were, on average, 47 years old when nominated — five years younger than President Barack Obama’s, who were, on average, about 52 years old. In just one term, President Trump appointed 54 appellate judges, of which six were in their 30s, 20 were under age 45, and only five were over the age of 55.

By comparison, in two terms, President Obama nominated 55 appellate judges, with none in their 30s, only six under age 45 — and 21 were over the age of 55.

At a glance, these age differences might not seem like much. But given that such positions are lifetime appointments, they will give Republicans a significant advantage over the long term. And the pattern of GOP presidents choosing younger judges did not begin with Trump, even if he took the practice to a new level. Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have appointed all of the youngest 25 federal appellate judges (at the time of their nomination), 45 of the youngest 50 and 76 of the youngest 100.

Read the story on Washington Post

Say His Name The first Black lawyer to argue before the Texas Supreme Court

Long before there was a Martin Luther King Jr. dreaming of equality and a Thurgood Marshall filing landmark civil rights lawsuits in the 20th century, there was John N. Johnson of Brazos County doing the same, only he did it in the previous century.

He was a Black man, in Texas, during the dangerous years after Reconstruction ended and federal troops pulled out of the state.

The first time Johnson applied to Brazos County’s district court to be a lawyer, he was rejected. The second time, he was rejected again.

After his third try, he made it. Why did it take so long?

The case can be made — and The Watchdog makes it in this Black History Month — that Johnson was far ahead of his time. On his legal plate as one of Texas’ most important civil rights leaders, he fought on matters such as Blacks blocked from serving on juries, police abuse, mass incarceration of Black men, education inequalities, and segregation on public transportation.

All of this was done before 1900.

Johnson’s name is not on any building. There’s no plaque for him. No book has been written about him. There’s not even a known photograph of Johnson, just a sketch from the turn of the century.

Read the story on Dallas News

More of This LA’s new DA wants to hire Rodney King prosecutor to oversee police misconduct 

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón asked the Board of Supervisors on Friday for permission to hire a special prosecutor to oversee police misconduct investigations, following a campaign where he promised to reconsider filing charges in a number of controversial police shootings where his predecessor declined to prosecute officers.

Gascón will seek to hire Lawrence S. Middleton, a former federal prosecutor who won convictions against the officers who beat Rodney King and once headed the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles. Middleton would be hired “to assist the D.A. in investigating, providing recommendations, and prosecuting cases of police misconduct at the direction of the D.A.,” according to the letter issued Friday.

In a statement, Gascón said Middleton’s role would include reviewing a quartet of controversial officer-involved shootings that former Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey declined to prosecute during her eight years in office. The cases that Gascón promised to reexamine included the 2015 shooting of an unarmed homeless man, Brendon Glenn, by an LAPD officer, a case in which even former police chief Charlie Beck had called on Lacey to file charges.

“The independence of these investigations along with accountability where wrongdoing has occurred is essential to rebuilding trust between law enforcement and the communities we serve,” Gascón said in a statement. “Police cannot safely and effectively safeguard communities that do not trust them as the public will be less likely to report crimes.”

Read the story on LA Times

Read This The law professor who became a cop

The following is an interview with Rosa Brooks, professor at Georgetown Law, spent five years as a police officer to research her new book “Tangled Up in Blue”. 

It struck me reading your first book and this book that, in some ways, you’re describing two very similar phenomena.

How everything became crime and the police became everything.

Are they part of the same story in some way?

Very much so, and funny you should ask. The second book was originally going to be about those connections. On the domestic side, we’ve seen enormous overcriminalization, where both civil infractions and regulatory offenses get redefined as crime, brand-new crimes get created, misdemeanors get redefined as felonies. We’ve just created more and more crimes, and the more crimes you create, the more cops you need to enforce those crimes. If you look at some major cities and how much they spend on policing, compared to what they spend on all social services combined, policing expenditures tend to dwarf all other services. It’s just unbelievable. Also, just as a lot of war-making increasingly resembles policing overseas, a lot of policing domestically looks like war-fighting.

Why did you think it was important to tell the story of policing in America in part through the lens of how police officers are trained?

I’ve always been fascinated with the stories people tell about violence and its relationship to law. When I was in law school, I spent a semester in South Africa and wrote up a sort of a thesis on cultural transformation and the South African police. And, over the years, my work often brought me into contact with policing issues, usually in other countries, and the parallels to some of the issues that fascinated me when it came to the military were pretty clear. When I discovered this truly bizarre Police Reserve Corps program in D.C., I just thought, You’re kidding. You’d let a law professor have a badge and a gun? And I was just immediately struck by how weird but also how fascinating it would be to be on the inside of a culture that is so opaque in so many ways, that is sometimes lionized, sometimes vilified, but doesn’t tend to be particularly well understood.

Why did you think learning about the culture of policing would teach you about the larger issues of policing in America?

I think in general, if you want to change something, you have to understand it. How did cops make sense of their roles? And what are the formative experiences and stories that they hear and tell one another, and tell themselves, that shaped their sense of professional identity and their roles? Part of the reason that there’s so much focus on training in the book is that you get a pretty diverse group of people that go into policing, and, much as in the military, one of the goals of police academies is to take this diverse group and turn them into indistinguishable cops who will behave in reliable and predictable ways. That training has a really profound impact on how cops understand their role. There is that sense of professional acculturation and professional identity. The training academy is not the only part of it but it’s a crucible for would-be cops. And the framing of “us versus them,” “everybody wants to kill you,” and “you have to constantly be prepared for everyone to try to kill you” certainly struck me, as I was going through the experience of being a recruit at the police academy, as critical to understanding why policing is so violent in the United States. What do you have to believe to make the level of police violence in this country make sense if you’re a cop? The answer is you have to believe that it’s shoot or be shot, and that is what many cops believe.

Read the story on New Yorker

Watch This

Waging Change, a new documentary by Abby Ginzberg featuring Saru Jayaraman, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, who have been working tirelessly for One Fair Wage, weaves together the female driven movements that reveal an American workers’ struggle hidden in plain sight-- the effort to end the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 for restaurant servers and bartenders and the #MeToo movement's efforts to end sexual harassment. 

Premiers February 19 at 8PM. More information here ​

LAFLA Symposium featuring Chris Punongbayan

The Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles is honored to host our virtual symposium, The Next 100 Years: Advancing Racial Justice & Empowering Communities. We invite you to join us the week of February 22-26, 2021 as we reflect on Black History Month and, through a series of panels, explore the intersection of racial justice and LAFLA’s work across the spectrum of public interest law.

Register here

Navigating the Clerkship process for BIPOC Students

A distinguished panel shared insight into the application process, what the advisory committee is looking for, and how an applicant may be disqualified. 

February 22, 2021 4:00PM. Register here ​

How to become a Federal Judge

A distinguished panel shared insight into the application process, what the advisory committee is looking for, and how an applicant may be disqualified. 

Webinar recording available here

Class Action Conference 

Each year, Impact Fund hosts this invitation-only event to bring together leading plaintiffs' class action practitioners to discuss important new developments, share knowledge and ideas, and develop strategies for the future. The Conference provides an unparalleled opportunity for attendees to connect and forge relationships with like-minded advocates across the country.

February 25, 2021 via Zoom. Register here (pw: CL@55)