Biden names judge for Ninth Circuit

Jennifer Sung, a labor official in Oregon and a longtime labor lawyer and former union organizer, was nominated by President Biden on Wednesday to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, his first selection for the nation’s largest federal appeals court.

Sung was appointed by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown in 2017 to the state’s Employment Relations Board, which referees labor disputes for public and private employees in the state. Before that, she was a labor lawyer in Portland for four years and in San Francisco for the preceding six years.

Sung was an organizer with the Service Employees International Union for six years before attending Yale Law School, where she graduated in 2004. She then worked as a law clerk for the late Ninth Circuit Judge Betty Fletcher and spent two years at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University before entering law practice.

In announcing the nominations of Sung and other judicial candidates, the White House press office said Biden was carrying out his promise “to ensure that the nation’s courts reflect the diversity that is one of our greatest assets as a country.”

The office noted that Sung, if confirmed by the Senate, would be the court’s first judge of Asian American Pacific Islander descent from Oregon. The Ninth Circuit currently has three AAPI judges among its 29 active members, and a fourth in senior status with a reduced caseload.

The circuit had been the nation’s most consistently liberal court, with a substantial majority of Democratic appointees, before Senate Republicans blocked most of President Barack Obama’s appellate nominations in his final years in office and cleared the way for President Donald Trump to appoint 10 judges to the court. There are still 16 Democratic appointees among the 29 judges, but the panels that hear most cases are ideologically divided.

Four Ninth Circuit judges — Susan Gerber, Marsha Berzon, Richard Paez and William Fletcher, the son of Betty Fletcher — have announced that they will take senior status once their successors are nominated and confirmed. All were appointed by Democratic President Bill Clinton.