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The 39-year-old legal scholar has the qualifications for the highest court in the land, experts say.
By Pacific Citizen Staff and Associated Press
Published April 2, 2010
In an era when appeals court experience is virtually a prerequisite for the Supreme Court, experts say if Goodwin Liu is confirmed for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, he could become the first Asian Pacific American chosen for the Supreme Court.
“I can easily imagine him as a high court nominee,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a Liu supporter and dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine.
The 39-year-old legal scholar, Rhodes Scholar, former high court clerk and current assistant dean and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley has the qualifications.
Young judges appointed to the bench in the mid-1980s remain powerful forces on appeal courts in Chicago, Cincinnati, Richmond, Va., and San Francisco. And five of the nine current Supreme Court justices became appeals court judges before they were 45. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy were nominated to appellate judgeships before they turned 40, though Senate Democrats blocked Roberts’ nomination near the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency.
But Heather Gerken, a Yale law professor and former law clerk to Justice David Souter, said she believes concerns about judicial salaries –– lower than at private firms and top-notch law schools –– and the threat of unpleasant confirmation hearings could complicate the search for judicial nominees.
“I think it’s harder to find Goodwin Lius nowadays than it used to be,” Gerken said. “People are less willing to give up great careers elsewhere to go on the judiciary at a young age.”
Asian Pacific American groups, including the JACL, have celebrated Liu’s nomination.
Liu’s March 24 hearing was postponed amid debate over the health care reform bill. The National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), which announced that it would that day host a judiciary hearing viewing party in Los Angeles, Calif., also postponed the event.
“We think it is wonderful that many consider that Professor Liu has the intellect, temperament, collegiality, and fairness to be a Supreme Court justice,” said Wendy Wen Yun Chang, NAPABA judiciary committee co-chair. “His nomination is a major stepping-stone in increasing Asian Pacific American participation on the federal bench.”
If a fight over Liu’s nomination emerges in the Senate, Republicans will likely label him a liberal judicial activist, while Democrats will defend Liu as a moderate committed to core constitutional values.
They will talk about his impact on the 9th Circuit, but the real focus will be on something else.
“The bigger concern is that he’ll wind up on the Supreme Court,” said Curt Levey of the conservative Committee for Justice.
Both parties have done this dance before. Democrats charged Republicans with delaying for more than a year Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation as an appeals court judge in the late 1990s because they saw her –– correctly, it turned out –– as the high court’s first Hispanic justice. Sotomayor was 43 when President Bill Clinton nominated her to the appeals court. Last May, Obama picked her for the Supreme Court.
Republicans claimed Democrats repaid them in kind after President George W. Bush nominated a leading conservative lawyer and a Hispanic, Miguel Estrada, to the appeals court in Washington in 2001. Estrada was 39 when nominated and three weeks shy of his 41st birthday when he withdrew his nomination after waiting more than two years.
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