FEATUrE FEATURE
One Bench, Two Gavels
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UCLA Law alumni Jacqueline Nguyen ’91 and Paul Watford ’94 join the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Jacqueline Nguyen ’91 and Paul Watford ’94 were confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the nation’s largest federal appeals court. With combined experience that spans from Supreme Court clerkships and private practice to the U.S. Attorney’s Office and California’s Superior Court, Judges Nguyen and Watford are continuing UCLA Law’s long tradition of alumni distinction. UCLA School of Law now has a total of six graduates who are judges on the Ninth Circuit, the largest number of graduates from any institution serving on the court. Jacqueline Nguyen and Paul Watford join the law school’s incumbent members: Alex Kozinski ’75, Sanda Segal Ikuta ’88, Dorothy Nelson ’53 and Kim McLane Wardlaw ’79. Jacqueline Nguyen was nominated by President Obama in September 2011 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 7, 2012. She is the first Vietnamese-American federal judge and the first Asian-Pacific American female United States circuit judge in the nation. Since 2009, she served as a United States District Judge in the Central District of California in Los Angeles. Previously, she was a judge of the Los Angeles County Superior Court—the first Vietnamese-American woman ever appointed to the court. She joined the United States Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California in 1995, serving as an assistant United States attorney in the criminal division and as deputy chief of the general crimes section. She began her career in private practice at Musick, Peeler & Garrett LLP, where she specialized in civil litigation as a litigation associate
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and focused on commercial disputes, intellectual property and construction-defect cases. She earned an A.B. degree in English from Occidental College in 1987 and her J.D. from UCLA Law in 1991. Judge Nguyen helped found and was president of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association and was a board member of the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles. Paul Watford was nominated by President Obama in October 2011 and confirmed by the U.S. Senate on May 21, 2012. He is the fourth African American on the Ninth Circuit court. Judge Watford was previously an appellate litigation partner at the law firm of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP in Los Angeles, California, where he had worked since 2001. He became a partner in 2003, and his practice focused on appellate litigation in state and federal courts and on a variety of legal issues in most major areas of the law. Before that, he served as an assistant United States attorney for the Central District of California, where he prosecuted a wide range of federal criminal cases, including complex white-collar criminal cases as a member of the major frauds section. After graduating from UCLA Law in 1994, he clerked for Judge Kozinski on the Ninth Circuit and for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court. He received his bachelor of arts degree from UC Berkeley in 1989. At UCLA Law, he served as an editor of the UCLA Law Review and graduated Order of the Coif. Judges Nguyen and Watford discuss their career paths and reflect on their time at UCLA Law in the following Q&A.