With Assistant U.S. Attorney Jamel Semper’s nomination this week to the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, President Joe Biden has now put forward nine federal judicial nominees from New Jersey since taking office in 2021. A tenth nominee, Magistrate Judge Edward Kiel, is expected to be officially unveiled soon.
The president’s nominations – made in heavy consultation with New Jersey’s U.S. Senators, Cory Booker and Bob Menendez – have significantly reshaped the 17-member District Court, which covers the entire state of New Jersey. Right now, Biden-nominated judges make up eight of the court’s non-senior judges; assuming Semper and Kiel are confirmed by the Senate, Biden nominees will soon compose a majority of the court.
Those eight Biden-nominated judges replaced six judges nominated by George W. Bush, one by George H.W. Bush, and one by Bill Clinton. Semper and Kiel are both set to succeed judges put on the bench by Barack Obama.
Of the remaining seven non-Biden judges who will continue to serve on the court, two were nominated by George W. Bush and five by Barack Obama. (Donald Trump was unable to put any of his own nominees on the court because of opposition from Booker and Menendez.)
Thanks to the retirement of Judge Joseph Greenaway this summer, Biden will also have the chance to put his first New Jerseyan on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The multi-state circuit court already includes three Biden-nominated judges from Pennsylvania and Delaware, but Greenaway’s retirement opens up the first of four New Jersey-based seats.
Like elsewhere in the country, New Jersey’s roster of Biden-nominated judges is a highly diverse one. Of the ten judges that have been nominated by Biden or will soon be, six are men and four are women; four are white, three are Black, two are Asian American, and one is Latina.
The nominees also come from a number of different professional backgrounds. Immediately prior to being nominated to the federal bench, three of Biden’s nominees were federal magistrate judges, three were private practice lawyers, two served as counsel to a New Jersey governing body, one was an assistant U.S. Attorney, and one was a judge of the Superior Court, New Jersey’s lower-level statewide court system.
Notably, however, no nominees so far have been former public defenders. Putting more public defenders on the bench has been a priority for both Biden and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy – as evidenced by their respective nominations of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court and Michael Noriega to the New Jersey Supreme Court – but that emphasis has not yet extended to New Jersey’s federal judiciary.
How each judge got to the court
When Biden took office in January 2021, more than one-third of the federal judgeships in New Jersey were vacant, thanks to Booker’s and Menendez’s unwavering opposition to Trump’s judicial nominees. (Senators get quite a bit of sway over their home state’s federal judges via blue slips, which allow them to block or delay judicial nominations from their state – not unlike senatorial courtesy in the New Jersey Senate.)
That meant Biden had an immediate opportunity to make his mark on the court. In March 2021, he unveiled his first two nominees: Julien Neals, Bergen County’s county counsel and a former Newark municipal judge, and Zahid Quraishi, a federal magistrate judge who had previously been an assistant U.S. Attorney.
Neals had been nominated for the District Court once before, in 2015, and he had cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee without opposition. But with Republicans controlling the Senate at the time, his nomination was simply never put forward for a Senate vote, and it expired at the end of 2016 with no action taken.
Neals was not renominated by Trump, temporarily shutting down his path to the federal judiciary. But Biden gave Neals another chance, and this time his nomination succeeded easily, passing the Senate on June 8, 2021 on a 66-33 vote; Neals was the first Biden-nominated federal judge anywhere in the country to be confirmed by the Senate.
Quraishi was confirmed two days later on a resounding 81-16 vote. His ascendance to the bench made him the first Muslim federal judge in U.S. history, as well as the first Asian American judge to serve on the New Jersey District Court.
Next came Christine O’Hearn, a high-powered South Jersey lawyer nominated by Biden in April 2021. She was confirmed by the Senate on October 19 of that year on a 53-44 vote.
In May 2021, Biden nominated Karen Williams, another federal magistrate judge who had previously run an Atlantic City law firm. Williams, who was nominated to a seat that had been vacant for more than four years, was confirmed 56-38 on October 26, 2021.
On November 3, 2021 – as New Jersey Democrats were reeling from their unexpectedly poor showing in state-level elections the day before – Biden named his next two nominees, Georgette Castner and Evelyn Padin.
Castner, another high-powered South Jersey lawyer, is married to Democratic powerbroker Bill Castner. Her nomination ran into more Republican opposition than any other New Jersey nominee thus far, but she still passed the Senate 52-47 on March 31, 2022, with two Republicans voting in favor; at age 43, Castner could conceivably serve for decades to come.
Padin, also a private practice attorney, was a former president of the New Jersey Bar Association and a major player in the state’s Hispanic law community. Her nomination was approved by the Senate 51-43 on May 25, 2022, finally filling the seat that Neals had been denied more seven years earlier.
Last December, Biden did something he hadn’t done before: nominate a white man, or more accurately two. They were Michael Farbiarz, general counsel for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and a former assistant U.S. Attorney, and Robert Kirsch, a Superior Court judge from Union County who had been a Republican until switching his party affiliation to independent after the January 6 Capitol attack.
The two nominations proceeded in tandem with one another, and both passed the Senate on May 2 of this year, Farbiarz on a 65-34 vote and Kirsch on a 57-42 vote.
Finally, there are Semper and Kiel, both of whom are rising stars who were recently considered for other top jobs. Semper was in the running for both U.S. Attorney and New Jersey Attorney General, while Kiel was on the shortlist for a seat on the New Jersey Supreme Court.
Semper is also just 41 years old, meaning that he would take Castner’s spot as the youngest member of the New Jersey District Court – and potentially have a long judicial career ahead of him.
Given the slow operating pace of the U.S. Senate, they’ll probably have to wait at least several months to be confirmed. But barring the unexpected, it’s likely that both will eventually end up on the bench – further remaking the New Jersey District Court in the image of Biden, Booker, and Menendez.