CAPAC applauds President Obama’s nomination of Goodwin Liu for Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals

Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty in 2003, Liu was an associate at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C. He clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the October 2000 Term, and for Judge David S. Tatel on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1998-1999. Between his clerkships, Liu served as a Special Assistant to the Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education.  He has also worked for the Corporation for National Service, where he helped launch the AmeriCorps
program.  

Liu was born in Augusta, Georgia, to parents who emigrated from Taiwan, and he grew up in Sacramento where he attended public schools.  Liu earned a B.S. from Stanford University in 1991, an M.A from Oxford in 2002, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar, and a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1998.

CAPAC Members are pleased that President Obama is committed to nominating individuals of the highest caliber, such as Goodwin Liu, to the federal bench, while at the same time making judicial diversity a top priority. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been underrepresented in the federal judiciary, constituting less than 1% of the bench prior to President Obama’s Administration.  In his first year and a half in office, he has already doubled the federal presence of Asian American and Pacific Islander judges.