WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden picked his first federal judicial nominees on Tuesday, including a former federal public defender, Candace Jackson-Akiwumi, to be on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals based in Chicago.
He also nominated Tiffany Cunningham, an intellectual and patent attorney, who is a partner at Perkins Coie LLP in Chicago, for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.
Both Jackson-Akiwumi and Cunningham are Black women and are part of Biden’s push to quickly diversify the federal judiciary and provide a contrast to the almost all white, male picks of former President Donald Trump. Biden promised during his campaign that he would nominate a Black woman to fill his first Supreme Court vacancy.
Biden’s first wave of judicial nominees comes as Democrats want him to pick up the pace on vacancies to mitigate one of Trump’s major legacies — his relatively high numbers of confirmed federal district and appeals judges named in his single term, plus three members of the Supreme Court.
The Seventh Circuit at present has no Black judges. If confirmed, Jackson-Akiwumi would be the second judge of color on the Seventh; the first was Judge Ann Claire Williams, who retired in 2018.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, noted that lack of diversity in his statement.
“I am particularly heartened by the nomination of Candace Jackson-Akiwumi to an Illinois seat on the Seventh Circuit. As a former federal public defender, Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi brings with her an important perspective that is a valuable asset to the judiciary. Once confirmed, Ms. Jackson-Akiwumi will bring much-needed demographic diversity back to the Seventh Circuit, which currently has no African American judges,” Durbin said.
Biden nominated 10 federal circuit and district court nominees, and one person to be a District of Columbia superior court judge.
According to a biography provided by the White House, Jackson-Akiwumi is a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP in Washington “where she focuses on complex civil litigation, white collar criminal defense and investigations.”
Jackson-Akiwumi, 41, worked in Chicago from 2010 to 2020 as a staff attorney at the federal defender program in the Northern District of Illinois. There, the White House said, she “represented more than 400 indigent clients accused of federal crimes at every stage of the process, from investigation to trial, sentencing, and appeal.”
In a biography posted on the website of the Yale Law School — where she graduated in 2005 — Jackson-Akiwumi said of her public defender job: “I work harder and longer hours than I did as a law firm associate. But I do not mind the harder work, longer hours and lower pay because my job has meaning to me. I provide quality representation to people who would not be able to afford it, and I am there for clients at a most dreary and frightening juncture: when they are being judged for the worst day or days in their life.”
Before that, she was a litigation associate at the Chicago office of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom from 2007 to 2010.
At the start of her law career, she was a law clerk for now retired U.S. District Court Judge David Coar from 2005 to 2006.
Jackson-Akiwumi received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 2000.
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Cunningham joined Perkins Coie in 2014. According to biographies from the White House and Perkins, she is on the 17-member executive committee of the firm. She has handled trial and appellate cases “for large multinational companies, as well as small enterprises, and individuals in complex patent and trade secret disputes.
She was also a partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP, joining the firm in 2002 as an associate. She became a partner in 2007 and left in 2014.
Cunningham received her undergraduate degree in 1998 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she majored in chemical engineering. She is a 2001 graduate of Harvard Law School.
Biden emphasized diversity in his nominations for lifetime appointments.
“This trailblazing slate of nominees draws from the very best and brightest minds of the American legal profession. Each is deeply qualified and prepared to deliver justice faithfully under our Constitution and impartially to the American people — and together they represent the broad diversity of background, experience, and perspective that makes our nation strong,” he said in a statement.
The White House said the first group of judicial nominees are lawyers “who have excelled in the legal field in a wide range of positions, including as renowned jurists, public defenders, prosecutors, in the private sector, in the military and as public servants at all levels of government.”
The White House called Biden’s initial picks “groundbreaking nominees, including three African American women chosen for Circuit Court vacancies, as well as candidates who, if confirmed, would be the first Muslim American federal judge in U.S. history, the first AAPI woman to ever serve on the U.S. District Court for the District of D.C., and the first woman of color to ever serve as a federal judge for the District of Maryland.”
