Thursday, July 17, 2003
Page 1
Judith Levey Meyer to Run for Superior Court Judge
By a Metnews Staff Writer
Deputy District Attorney Judith Levey Meyer yesterday became the first candidate to announce an intention to run for an open seat on the Los Angeles Superior Court.
Although no incumbents have said they won’t run, Meyer said she is hopeful that a seat will open up by the time qualifying opens in November.
While she loves being a prosecutor, Meyer told the METNEWS, running for the bench in the primary next March is “the right decision at the right time.” A judge, she said, is “something I’ve wanted to be since day one of my career at law school.”
She has retained Cerrell Associates, Inc. as her consulting firm. Hal Dash, president of the firm, said Meyer is an ideal candidate, because of her prosecutorial background—it has been a number of years since anyone other than a prosecutor won a judicial contest in which no sitting judge was running—and her aggressive approach to running.
“She’s an enthusiastic campaigner,” Dash said. “She enjoys campaigning and she’s good at it.”
Meyer, a Long Beach resident, is currently a sex crimes prosecutor at the Torrance courthouse. She noted that she handles “very serious cases,” nearly all of them involving potential life sentences.
Meyer is a 1988 graduate of UC Santa Barbara, and worked as an emergency medical technician in Santa Barbara during her last two years of school. She also has extensive experience as a guide for white-water rafting, skiing, and bicycling trips.
She earned a law degree from Pepperdine University in 1993, and received a certificate from the university’s alternative dispute resolution program the same year.
She began her prosecutorial career as a deputy district attorney in Ventura County, but switched to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office the following year.
She joined the Ventura office, she explained yesterday, because she was living in the San Fernando Valley and the Los Angeles office was not hiring at the time. But three months after taking the job, she said, she met Steve Meyer, an engineer from Orange County, and later took the Los Angeles job in order to cut down on the distance between them.
They were married two years ago and live in Long Beach, part-way between their respective workplaces.
Meyer said she does not expect to have any difficulty making the transition from advocate to arbiter.
“My [current] job is not just to prosecute,” she commented. “I try to be as objective as possible, and I think I have a reputation for being fair.”
She said she expects to have the support of a number of defense attorneys, as well as prosecutors, in her campaign. She has already collected endorsements from several judges and commissioners at the Torrance, Inglewood, and Compton courthouses.
Meyer is also an assistant professor at Pacific Coast University School of Law in Long Beach. Understanding and appreciating arguments on both sides of an issue, she said, is something she tries to teach her students.
Copyright 2003, Metropolitan News Company