SCOTUS Overturning Roe v. Wade Highlights the Importance of Appointing Federal Judges

     Since January 2021, President Biden has appointed 121 federal judges to the bench; Donald Trump would appoint 85 in his first two years. There are close to 180 vacancies for President Biden to fill; even though he took office with far fewer vacancies than when President Trump took office, he could very easily surpass the 234 appointments President Trump made in his four years in office. We may not be able to flip the Supreme Court, but we can ensure that America's entire federal bench beneath that-- from the district courts to the territorial courts to the circuit courts to the Article I courts to the D.C. courts-- are as far left as they can possibly be. As we work to fill these other 60+ vacancies, there are a few candidates I have in mind, most of whom were mentioned as possible Supreme Court nominees for President Biden; the nominees with this distinction will be bolded:

1. Danielle Holley-Walker, a graduate of Yale and Harvard with extensive experience as a civil rights attorney, currently serving as president of Howard University School of Law, belongs on the D.C. Court of Appeals.
2. Maite Oronoz Rodriguez, an openly gay Hispanic woman, is serving as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico after a distinguished career as an associate justice on the same court as well as several other positions in Puerto Rico's criminal justice system and years of private practice built on a cum laude graduation from Villanova University, the UPR Law School, and Columbia University; she belongs on the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
3. J. Paul Oetken, the first openly gay man to be confirmed as an Article III judge, graduated from Yale, clerked under Harry Blackmun, and has spent well over a decade as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York; he belongs on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
4. Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, is the cousin of the late PBS anchor Gwen Ifill and the daughter of African Methodist Episcopalian ministers who immigrated from Barbados. She graduated from Vassar College and NYU School of Law before a four-decade career spanning from affirmative action to voting rights to anti-lynching and other human rights causes, and she belongs on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
5. Tamika Montgomery-Reeves, an associate justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, was previously a graduate magna cum laude of the University of Mississippi and the University of Georgia Law School and Vice Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery, and she belongs on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
6. Anita Earls, an associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, graduated from Yale Law School and studied the role of women in Tanzania before joining the state's first integrated law firm, working on civil rights issues in the Clinton DOJ, founding a nonprofit responsible for leading voting rights efforts and overturning GOP gerrymanders in North Carolina, and leading North Carolina's Task Force for Racial Equith in Criminal Justice, and she belongs on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
7. Cheri Beasley, former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, belongs on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals only if she does not win the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina.
8. Robert L. Pitman, a U.S. district judge for the Western District of Texas, graduated from the University of Texas Law School and Oxford before serving as an assistant U.S. attorney and then a magistrate judge under the Bush administration and then becoming the first gay U.S. attorney in Texas and (so far) only gay man to serve as a U.S. attorney and then the first gay man to serve as a federal judge in the Fifth Circuit under the Obama administration; in this position, he struck down Texas' "anti-conservative social media censorship" bill and temporarily blocked the Texas Heartbeat Act. He belongs on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where he would be the first LGBT2SQIA+ appeals judge in the circuit and could get a bipartisan vote.
9. Leondra Krueger, an associate justice of the California Supreme Court, is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants and granddaughter of Jewish immigrants and a National Merit Scholar, a graduate magna cum laude of Harvard, a former member of Phi Beta Kappa, a graduate of Yale, and the first black female editor of the Yale Law Journal. A justice on the California Supreme Court and one of four women shortlisted and actually interviewed by President Biden for a spot on the Supreme Court, she belongs on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
10. Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the husband of Ninth Circuit Appeals Court Judge Lucy Koh, Cuéllar was born in Mexico and moved the Calexico, California, right along the border, as a teenager. He got his BA magna cum laude from Harvard in 1993, earned his JD from Yale in 1997, and received a PhD in political science from Stanford in 2000; while in law school, he co-founded a non-profit providing opportunities to teach English to underserved communities. He spent nearly 15 years as a prestigious educator in international affairs at Stanford Law School while working on the Obama-Biden Transition Project, the White House Domestic Policy Council, and the National Equity and Excellence Commission; his work helped lead to landmark legislation like the Fair Sentencing Act, the Food Safety Modernization Act, the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act, and much more. He spent nearly seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court upon appointment by Governor Jerry Brown before  becoming the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in November 2021. He belongs serving alongside his wife on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
11. L. Song Richardson earned a BA from Harvard and a JD from Yale before working as a public defender and an assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She was the first woman of color to be a dean of one of the nation's top 30 law schools (UC-Irvine School of Law) before accepting a job as the president of Colorado College. She has also written numerous books on criminal justice reform, and she belongs on the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.
12. Michelle Alexander received a Truman Scholarship at Vanderbilt University before earning her JD from Stanford Law School. She directed the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, which led a nationwide campaign against police profiling, from 1998 to 2005; before directing the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School, clerking for SCOTUS justice Harry Blackmun, and working as an opinion columnist for the New York Times. She also wrote the book The New Jim Crow on the impacts of mass incarceration and appeared in the documentaries Hidden Colors 2 and 13th. She opened up about receiving an abortion after being raped in her first year of law school in opposition to Ohio's Heartbeat Bill, and she belongs on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.
13. Goodwin Liu, a Taiwanese-descended, Georgia-born judge, moved to Florida and then Sacramento as a child, where he graduated high school, before receiving his BS from Stanford, M.Phil. as a Rhodes Scholar from Oxford, and a JD from Yale Law School. He clerked for D.C. Circuit Appellate Judge David S. Tatel, clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (where he helped write her dissent in Bush v. Gore), served as president of the American Constitution Society, and provided counsel to AmeriCorps and the U.S. Department of Education. A board member of the National Women's Law Center, American Philosophical Society, Alliance for Excellent Education, and American Law Institute, he became Associate Dean and Professor of Law at the University of California-Berkeley and won the Distinguished Teaching Award. He was nominated to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by President Obama in 2010, where Republicans filibustered his nomination, before being appointed to the Supreme Court of California by Governor Jerry Brown in 2011. A prolific, high-profile writer alongside Pamela Karlan, who is listed below, Liu would be a perfect judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
14. Kenji Yoshino was the class valedictorian at Phillips Exeter Academy in 1987 and earned a BA in English literature summa cum laude from Harvard in 1991. He worked as an aid for members of the Japanese Parliament, earned a M.Sc. in management studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1993, and earned a JD from Yale Law School in 1996 after working as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. After clerking for Second Circuit Appellate Judge Guido Calabresi, he became a tenured professor at Yale, where courts as high as the U.S. Supreme Court referenced his work. He has written three books, mostly related to LGBT2SQIA+ rights, and became a professor at New York University School of Law before becoming a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers. A gay, Japanese-American poet, he would be perfect for the Southern District of New York.
15. Melissa Murray, raised in Florida as the daughter of a nurse and a dentist, earned a BA from the University of Virginia in 1997 and JD from Yale Law School in 2002, working as the notes editor of the Yale Law Journal in the latter institution. The only African-American clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, she served under Sonia Sotomayor as well as Stefan Underhill before serving as a professor at and interim dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Law. In this position, she was awarded the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction, wrote two books on reproductive rights, and served as faculty director of the Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, the first such college think tank in the United States. After transferring to New York State University, she testified at the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh and warned that he would overturn Roe v. Wade and joined the board of the American Constitution Society. She would be a perfect candidate for a federal judgeship in New York.
16. Chase Strangio, a Boston-born graduate of Northeastern University who has worked as a public defender and an attorney arguing LGBT2SQIA+ cases all the way up to the Supreme Court, being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world in the process, would be the first transgender federal judge if appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
17. Brigitte Amiri of New York is a prominent attorney who works as the deputy director of the Reproductive Freedom Project at the ACLU and also prominently worked to defeat Trump-era policies surrounding immigration, and she belongs on a U.S. district court in New York.
18. Pamela S. Karlan graduated Yale Law School and served as an editor of the Yale Law Review before clerking for Judge Abraham David Sofaer and SCOTUS Justice Harry Blackmun, helping to write Blackmun's dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick. She then worked at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, taught at the University of Virginia School of Law and Stanford, and joined the Obama Justice Department, where she helped implement United States v. Windsor. Aside from being named a potential SCOTUS candidate for President Biden, she was also a candidate for the Supreme Court for President Obama in 2009; she has also served as a member of the Facebook Content Oversight Board, testified before a U.S. House committee in favor of the impeachment of Donald Trump, served on the Joe Biden 2020 Presidential Transition Team, and worked as a principal deputy assistant attorney general for the USDOJ's Civil Rights Division. This self-described "snarky, bisexual Jewish" woman described as a "full-throated, unapologetic liberal torchbearer" would be an ideal candidate for the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
19. Thiruvendran Vignarajah, the son of Sri Lankan immigrants, worked as the president of the Harvard Law Review at the school where he earned his JD before clerking for Guido Calabresi and Stephen Breyer; teaching law at the University of Baltimore, University of Maryland, and Johns Hopkins Schools of Law; and serving as the Deputy Attorney General of Maryland, where he earned such a high profile for his work on police reform and environmental protection that he was targeted by conservative criminals from Project Veritas. This qualified and diverse nominee deserves a lifetime appointment to the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.

     If you live in any of these states, please contact your senators recommending these nominees. Senators hold a tremendous amount of sway in selecting the judges in their home states, and if our voices are heard loudly enough, these diverse, experienced, liberal, pro-choice men and women can be confirmed as judges and work every day to make America a better place.