Two judges confirmed to S.D. federal court

The U.S. Senate approved two more judges for San Diego’s federal bench this week, confirmations that mean President Joe Biden has appointed nearly half of the authorized judicial seats on the court, with another nomination waiting in the wings.

On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Judge Andrew Schopler to a district court seat by a 56-39 vote. A former federal prosecutor in San Diego, Schopler has been a magistrate judge since 2016. He will take the seat that was opened in January 2021 when U.S. District Judge Larry A. Burns assumed senior status, a position in which judges who turn 65 years old and whose age and years of service on the bench equal 80 take a lesser caseload.

Then on Wednesday, the Senate confirmed by a 51-43 vote San Diego Superior Court Judge James E . Simmons Jr. He has been a state court judge since 2017 and since April has been the supervising judge for the Vista branch of the Superior Court. Before that he was a prosecutor in the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office and the San Diego City Attorney’s Office.

Simmons will take the seat that became vacant in March 2021 when U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Battaglia went on senior status.

Carl Tobias, the Williams Chair in Law at the University of Richmond School of Law who tracks judicial nominations, said a comfortable margin for Schopler’s confirmation was expected. “It is not surprising that the nominee had a strong, bipartisan vote, because he had a smooth hearing, and the GOP senators are more willing to support magistrate judges because they possess so much relevant experience,” he said in an email.

Similarly, he said the vote to confirm Simmons was no surprise since he, like Schopler, did not get much opposition in his hearing before the Judiciary Committee. Tobias said both confirmations are important because the vacancies were deemed “emergencies” by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the administrative arm of the federal courts, based on case filings and judicial workloads in the Southern District of California, which covers both San Diego and Imperial counties.