Last updated on June 3, 2022
President Joseph R. Biden announced on May 25 the nomination of three additional candidates for seats on federal appeals courts.
To fill a seat on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Biden named U.S. district judge Florence Y. Pan.
Pan is a judge on the federal trial court in the nation’s capital. Before being confirmed to that post in 2021, she served on the bench in the District’s local court system for more than a decade and as an assistant U.S. attorney.
If confirmed, Pan would replace Ketanji Brown Jackson, who will take a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court after Justice Stephen G. Breyer retires this summer.
She is the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan and the granddaughter of refugees from China.
Rachel S. Bloomekatz was tapped to replace Judge Guy Cole, Jr. on the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
A former law clerk to Breyer, Bloomekatz has been in private practice since 2013. After starting her career in practice at Jones Day, she went on to become a partner at a Washington-based boutique firm and then became a solo practitioner. Bloomekatz is an appellate specialist and teaches federal courts at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.
Bloomekatz also clerked for Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court chief justice Margaret H. Marshall.
Biden chose Doris L. Pryor, a federal magistrate in Indiana, to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago.
Pryor has worked as both a public defender and as a prosecutor. She became a magistrate assigned to the U.S. District Court based in Indianapolis in 2018.
The Hope, Arkansas native began her career as a law clerk to Judge Lavenski Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. She then clerked for Judge J. Leon Holmes of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.
If confirmed, Pryor would replace Judge David F. Hamilton, who has served on the court since 2009.
Biden has nominated 27 individuals to the federal appeals courts. To date, sixteen have been confirmed.
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