WASHINGTON (CN) — Continuing what has been an early tradition of choosing demographically and professionally diverse individuals for court appointments, President Joe Biden added seven names to his roster of judicial nominees, bringing the total Tuesday to 27.
Myrna Perez, who has been tapped for a position at the Second Circuit, is the sole federal appeals court nominee introduced Tuesday.
Pérez has worked at a voting rights and elections program at New York University since 2006, now heading the program, and has also served an adjunct professor of clinical law for the university. Prior to that, she served as a fellow at Relman, Dane & Colfax, a civil rights law firm in Washington. If confirmed, Pérez would be the only Latina serving on the Manhattan-based federal appeals court.
Openings on the Connecticut federal bench, which sends appeals to the Second Circuit, account for three of Biden's District Court nominees today — Sarah Merriam, Omar Williams and Sarala Nagala — and two of the three have backgrounds in public defense.
Merriam spent eight years in the District of Connecticut as an assistant public defender and has served as a federal magistrate with the court since 2015. Before that, she worked on political campaigns in the Nutmeg State and was an associate at the law firm Cowdery, Ecker & Murphy.
Williams is also a judge already but at the state court level. Prior his Hartford Superior Court appointment, Williams was on the New London Superior Court from 2014 to 2016. Prior to that, he served as an assistant public defender for Connecticut since 2003.
Nagala is the only one of the Connecticut nominees with no background in public defense. She would, however, be the first judge of South Asian descent to serve on the Connecticut federal court. Nagala joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office there in 2012, eventually taking up the helm as deputy chief of the major crimes unit. From 2009 to 2012, Nagala was an associate at Munger, Tolles, & Olson in San Francisco.
For a federal judgeship in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Biden nominated Jia Cobb, a former public defender who more recently has been a partner at Relman Colfax focused on plaintiff-side civil rights issues including fair housing and other forms of discrimination. Cobb would be the second Black female judge actively serving on the District of Columbia’s federal bench. Her time as a D.C. public defender ran from 2006 to 2012.
Biden's fourth round of picks come on his 146th day in office. They join 11 candidates announced in March, three in April and six in May. As former President Donald Trump appointed more than 200 conservative judges, including three Supreme Court justices, during his single term, Democrats have moved quickly to confirm Biden’s judicial nominees.
On Monday the Senate voted 53-44 to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a third-round judicial pick rumored to be a top contender for a Supreme Court nomination, to the D.C. Circuit. Deborah L. Boardman and Lydia Kay Griggsby, both chosen by Biden to fill federal court vacancies for the District of Maryland are headed toward a Senate vote after being advanced Thursday by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
With many women, minorities and public defenders in the nomination pool so far, Biden has won praise in his party for the individuals he has chosen to date for court appointments. The White House said in a press release that all the picks Biden made Tuesday “are extraordinarily qualified, experienced, and devoted to the rule of law and our Constitution.”
Biden also nominated two individuals to serve on D.C.’s local courts Tuesday. Tovah Calderon has been tapped for the D.C. Court of Appeals and Kenia Lopez for D.C. Superior Court.
Calderon has been with the Department of Justice for two decades, joining in 2001 through the attorney general’s honors program. Her most recent position at the department has been as an acting deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division.
Lopez meanwhile has been a magistrate judge for the last nine years on the D.C. Superior Court. From 2009 to 2012, she worked at the court as a bilingual attorney negotiator in the domestic violence division.
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