Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Page 3
JNE Commission Evaluating Bigelow for Presiding Justice
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Court of Appeal Justice Tricia Bigelow of this district’s Div. Eight is being vetted for presiding justice of that division, the MetNews has learned.
Sources reported receiving questionnaires suggesting that Bigelow’s name had been forwarded by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to the State Bar Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation. The MetNews reported in March that the name of the acting presiding justice in Div. Eight, Laurence Rubin, had been sent to the JNE Commission.
Bigelow, 48, was named to the court by Schwarzenegger in May of last year. Whoever gets the appointment will succeed Presiding Justice Candace Cooper, the division’s first presiding justice, who stepped down at the end of December.
Both the JNE Commission and an independent committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association send out questionnaires once the governor has forwarded a name, in confidence, to the commission.
Bigelow was a judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court 1998 from 1998 until her elevation to the appellate bench. She previously served from 1995 to 1998 as a judge of the Los Angeles Municipal Court and, from 1986 to 1995, as a state deputy attorney general.
While working for the attorney general, she was judicial appointments co-chair for the League of Women Prosecutors.
Her father, the late M. Ross Bigelow, was a Los Angeles Superior Court judge from 1973 to 1988.
She attended college at California State University, Fullerton, and law school at Pepperdine University School of Law. She has also taught at Southwestern Law School as an adjunct professor and as a faculty member at the Center for Judicial Education and Research.
Bigelow is a Republican.
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