Fresh from his appointment of the first Latino to the U.S. Supreme Court, President Barack Obama has named four new federal judges for California, a newspaper report said on Sunday, according to Xinhua.
The four judges include three Asian Americans, who have long been underrepresented on the federal bench, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Two of the appointments are to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in Los Angeles, and two are to the Northern District of California in San Francisco. They will be brought before the Senate for confirmation after its summer recess, the newspaper said.
On Friday, a day after Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the Senate, the president named U.S. Magistrate Judges Edward M. Chen and Richard G. Seeborg to the Northern District bench. Both have served there as magistrate judges since 2001, according to the paper.
Obama also named Dolly Gee, managing partner of the Los Angeles law firm Schwartz, Steinsapir, Dohrmann & Sommers LLP, to the Central District bench. A week earlier, he named Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Jacquelyn H. Nguyen to the District Court in Los Angeles, the paper said.
"So far, his nominations have been quite diverse in terms of race and gender," Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said to the newspaper about Obama's choices to date for 16 of the 101 federal judgeships that were vacant nationwide when he took office.
Even after the four appointments to California districts, five seats remain vacant in the state -- two each in the Central and Northern districts and one in the Eastern District, which includes most of the state's prisons.
...