Wednesday, August 10, 2005
Page 1
Nora Manella Under Consideration for This District’s Court of Appeal
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The governor’s office has sent the name of U.S. District Judge Nora M. Manella to the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation as a possible appointee to this district’s Court of Appeal, the MetNews has learned.
Manella, 54, was a Los Angeles Municipal Court and Los Angeles Superior Court judge and U.S. attorney for the Central District of California before being appointed to the federal bench in 1998. She declined yesterday to discuss her interest in the appellate court, on which she served by assignment in 1992.
She joins a list of Los Angeles Superior Court judges who have been or are being evaluated by the commission as possible appellate justices.
Among them are Judges Joanne O’Donnell, James Chalfant, Stephen Suzukawa, Emilie Elias, Aurelio Munoz, Owen Lee Kwong, Peter Lichtman, Carl West, Ronald Coen, Frank Y. Jackson, William Highberger and Fumiko Wasserman.
There is currently one vacancy on the appellate court, a result of the April retirement of Justice Michael Nott from Div. Two.
The Los Angeles native is a graduate of Wellesley College and USC Law School. After graduating from law school in 1975, she clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for a year, then worked as legal counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution from 1976 to 1978.
She then joined the Washington office of O’Melveny & Myers, before returning to Los Angeles in 1982 to become an assistant U.S. attorney. She eventually became the office’s top criminal appellate lawyer before then-Gov. George Deukmejian named her to the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1990.
Deukmejian’s successor, Pete Wilson, elevated her to the Superior Court in 1992, and it was President Bill Clinton who appointed her as U.S. attorney in 1994 and as district judge four years later.
Copyright 2005, Metropolitan News Company