The Senate on Thursday voted to confirm Candace Jackson-Akiwumi to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which has not had a single judge of color for years.
A partner in a D.C. law firm only since last year, Jackson-Akiwumi spent a decade, between 2010 and 2020, as a staff attorney at the Federal Defender's office for the Northern District of Illinois. Jackson-Akiwumi will be only the second Black woman ever on the Seventh Circuit and will be the only person of color currently on the Chicago-based federal appeals court. The first was Judge Ann Claire Williams, who retired in 2018.
Jackson-Akiwumi was among those in President Biden’s first wave of 11 judicial nominations, where he made good on a promise to diversify the federal bench as well as to draw on lawyers with different backgrounds – including, as is Jackson-Akiwumi, public defenders. Of Biden’s 11 initial nominees, 9 are women; four have been public defenders; four come from the AAPI community and one is the nation’s first Muslim-American judge. Last Monday, the Senate voted to confirmed Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.