San Francisco Chronicle: Obama nominee Goodwin Liu an unassuming man

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Goodwin Liu, Associate Dean and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.
Nominee for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
39 Years Old


Goodwin Liu, the UC Berkeley law professor nominated last month by President Obama to a federal appeals court, has run four marathons and is making plans for a fifth. His road to Senate confirmation could be even longer.

The 39-year-old Liu, son of Taiwanese immigrants, has gleaming credentials: honor student, Rhodes scholar, Supreme Court law clerk, award-winning teacher, and author whose analysis of education law and policy has won praise across the political spectrum.

He's one of two Asian Americans nominated by Obama to the nation's appeals courts, which now have no one of Asian descent among nearly 175 full-time judges.

Liu is also a master chef and an accomplished fisherman, someone who, despite his accomplishments, is characterized by one friend as having "no ego" and being just "a little bit boring." Yet to his legal and political adversaries, Liu is a threat.

Nearly all the causes he has advocated are liberal. And the court to which he's been nominated, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, has been a liberal bastion in a predominantly conservative federal judiciary.

Of all of Obama's judicial nominees, Liu is "by far the biggest target," said Curt Levey, executive director of the conservative Committee for Justice. Democrats, he asserted, "are obviously grooming him for the Supreme Court."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/14/MN9K1C9QP9.DTL#ixzz0iMmN575n


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