Judicial Profile
Hon. Debra Ann Livingston
Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by Phil Schatz
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Phil Schatz is a partner at Wollmuth Maher & Deutsch LLP in New York City and a former president of the SDNY chapter of the FBA. Nicolás Quaid Galván, a graduate of Columbia Law School, formerly at Wollmuth Maher & Deutsch LLP and now an associate at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, provided research and editorial assistance for this article.
hen beloved Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the Second Circuit passed the baton to his successor on Sept. 1, 2020,1 the court, like the entire country, was confronting overwhelming challenges amidst the political polarization of an election year. Workplaces were vacated, schools were shuttered, and morgues filled up. And, if these challenges weren’t demanding enough, the court was halfway through an unusual period of transition, potentially jeopardizing its proud traditions of consensus and civility, adding a stream of new judges with disparate views, and strong personalities and opinions to match. “Covid complicated everything,” says former Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs,2 “and integrating so many new judges into the workings of the court is a real challenge, and a threat to collegial relations.”3 To meet these challenges, the court needed a chief with an unusual collection of special attributes—a diplomat of unusual tact and credibility; a leader who could listen with patience, evaluate with dispassion, and decide with resolve; a captain who could steer a crew of strong-minded equals through the disparate challenges of illness, conflict, and change. And, through a lucky confluence of seniority and circumstance, that is exactly what it got with new Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston.4 Debra Ann Livingston was born in Waycross, Ga., a small southern town that took its name from its many railroad junctions (tracks from six directions cross in the city). Waycross was the first town in Georgia to open municipal elections to women and is home to the first national park named after a woman, conservationist Laura S. Walker (1861–1955). Walt Kelly would occasionally mention Waycross in his nationally syndicated comic strip Pogo (1948–1975), set in the Okefenokee Swamp just south of town. Waycross is also notable for its 1950s campaign to encourage tourism; the highway patrol would stop out-of-state motorists and escort them to town, where they were met by a welcoming committee and treated to lodging, dinner, and visits to all the local attractions, primarily the swamp. Chief Judge Livingston didn’t live in Waycross for long. Her father’s work and promotions required the
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family to move every few years to states throughout the South, including Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Florida. “I went to eight schools in six different cities before finishing high school,” she says. The experience was more positive than negative. “You find good people wherever you go,” she says. Her middle and high school years in Nashville, Tenn.; Louisville, Ky; and Miami had the greatest impact. In Miami, where she graduated from Hialeah Miami Lakes, she was editor-in-chief of the high school paper and co-editor-in-chief of the yearbook, and she worked summers as a clerical assistant in the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office—the office over which Janet Reno would preside as the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida. During the school year, Chief Judge Livingston maintained a newspaper clippings file for Janet Reno’s predecessor and then for Reno herself, a part-time job that Chief Judge Livingston kept throughout her college years. A back-to-school spread in a 1970s teen magazine highlighting the (belated) integration of women into the Ivy League led Chief Judge Livingston to Princeton, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in three years from the School of Public and International Affairs. She loved Princeton. “Princeton at that time was very committed to teaching undergraduates, and