Senate Panel Clears 7 Nominees for Federal Judge Positions in New York
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced the nominations including four candidates for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, two for the Southern District of New York and one for the Western District.
June 20, 2019 at 11:38 AM
3 minute read
For the second time, the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday advanced the nominations of seven candidates to serve as federal judges on district courts across New York State.
The group included four candidates for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, two for the Southern District of New York and one for the Western District.
Initially announced last May as President Donald Trump's 14th wave of judicial nominees, the slate of nominees cleared the Judiciary Committee in September but did not receive a confirmation vote in the full Senate before the end of the last Congress. Trump renominated the prospective judges in April.
It was not immediately clear on Wednesday when the full Senate might act.
Of Trump's Eastern District nominees, Diane Gujarati and Gary Richard Brown had both been previously nominated by President Barack Obama but were not confirmed during his presidency.
Gujarati, who serves as deputy chief of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, previously worked as a litigation associate in the New York City office of Davis Polk & Wardwell. Brown is an adjunct professor at St. John's University School of Law and in 2014 was selected by the board of judges to serve on the committee of magistrate judges appointed to manage more than 1,400 Hurricane Sandy cases filed in the Eastern District.
Also nominated for the Brooklyn federal court, Eric Komitee, general counsel of Viking Global Investors in New York, previously served for eight years as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, where he eventually became chief of the business and securities fraud section. Rachel Kovner, an assistant to the solicitor general in the Solicitor General's Office within the Department of Justice, has represented the United States in litigation before the Supreme Court since 2013.
The Judiciary Committee on Thursday also approved Mary Kay Vyskocil and Lewis Liman for judgeships on the Southern District.
Vyskocil is a U.S. bankruptcy judge for the Southern District of New York, where she has served since 2016. She practiced general commercial litigation for almost 33 years at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
Liman is a partner in the New York City office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, and before joining the Cleary firm he was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. He served for five years as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he became deputy chief of appeals.
For the Western District, John Sinatra is a partner in the Buffalo firm Hodgson Russ. Before joining that law firm, he worked as senior counsel in the Department of Commerce and as an associate in the commercial litigation practice group at the law firm Jones Day.
Thursday's vote also approved nominees for district court judges in Maryland, Rhode Island, Texas, Illinois and West Virginia. The committee additionally advanced the nomination of Daniel Aaron Bress to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
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