Jean Rosenbluth Selected as United States Magistrate Judge for Central District of California

The United States District Court for the Central District of California announces the selection of Jean Rosenbluth as a United States Magistrate Judge. She will sit in Santa Ana in the Court’s Southern Division beginning September 26, 2011, after having been sworn in the week before, and will occupy a new Magistrate Judge position that was authorized for the District by the Judicial Conference of the United States in September 2010.

Prior to her selection as a Magistrate Judge, Rosenbluth was the Director of the Legal Writing and Advocacy program and a Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where she also taught Advanced Legal Writing and Advocacy and Appellate Advocacy. In this capacity, she was also an academic contributor to the eighth edition of Black’s Law Dictionary, and was a member of the Association of Legal Writing Directors’ Survey Committee and the Legal Writing Institute. Prior to joining the faculty of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Rosenbluth served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, then as Senior Litigation Counsel in the Criminal Division and Acting Co-Chief of the Criminal Appeals Unit, for the United States Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, she clerked for the Honorable Ferdinand F. Fernandez of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; the Honorable Alicemarie H. Stotler of the District Court for the Central District of California; and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. Rosenbluth has also been a sought-after legal expert on topical criminal law issues and high-profile trials, and a music industry reporter for various publications including the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Daily Variety, and Billboard.

Rosenbluth received her A.B. degree from Barnard College in 1983, and her J.D. in 1993 from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Southern California Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif.

Including the position to be occupied by Rosenbluth, the Central District of California has 24 authorized full-time and one part-time Magistrate Judge positions. The duties of Magistrate Judges include conducting preliminary proceedings in criminal cases, the trial and disposition of misdemeanor cases, conducting discovery and various other pretrial hearings in civil cases, the trial and disposition of civil cases upon consent of the litigants, and other matters as may be assigned. Magistrate Judges are appointed for a term of eight years, and can be reappointed to additional terms.

The Magistrate Judge position requires a minimum of five years as a member in good standing of the bar of the highest court of a state, and at least five years of active practice of law. The rigorous selection process, which is governed by statute and by regulations adopted by the Judicial Conference of the United States, includes detailed background reviews and interviews before a Merit Selection Panel consisting of attorneys and non-attorney public representatives. The Panel refers candidates to the District Court, where interviews are conducted by the District Court’s Magistrate Judges Committee. The top candidates are then referred to the full Court for review, selection, and appointment.

The Central District of California is comprised of the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Ventura, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo, and serves approximately 18.5 million people – more than half the population of the state of California. In 2010, more than 15,000 cases were filed in the District.
 

Terry Nafisi
District Court Executive