Friday, March 5, 2010
Page 3
U.S. Senate Confirms Local Attorney to Federal Trade Commission
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The U.S. Senate has confirmed President Obama’s nomination of Edith Ramirez, a partner in Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges’ Los Angeles office, to the Federal Trade Commission.
The Senate on Wednesday voted to confirm Ramirez and Senior North Carolina Deputy Attorney General Julie Brill to fill two vacancies on the five-member commission charged with promoting consumer protection and eliminating “anti-competitive” business practices.
Ramirez and Brill, both Democrats, respectively replace Republican Deborah Majoras, who stepped down in March 2008, and independent Pamela Jones Harbor, whose term ended last September. Each is scheduled to serve a seven-year term, but Ramirez’s term will be measured from September 2008, while Brill’s term commences as of last September.
Ramirez specializes in intellectual property and complex litigation matters, and her experience includes representation in copyright, trademark, antitrust, business tort and other general business litigation cases.
She is vice president of the Board of Commissioners of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and a member of the board of directors of Volunteers of America. Ramirez also worked as deputy political director and director of Latino outreach for Obama’s presidential campaign in California.
Admitted to the State Bar in 1993, she graduated from Harvard-Radcliffe College prior to attending Harvard Law School. Before joining Quinn Emanuel, Ramirez served as a law clerk to Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Alfred T. Goodwin and then as an associate at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher for three years.
In other news, the Senate on Wednesday also confirmed the nomination of Portola Valley attorney Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe as representative of the United States to the U.N. Human Rights Council, with the rank of ambassador.
Donahoe is an affiliated scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, and her research has focused on norms on use of force, U.N. reform and the international rule of law. Her 2006 Ph.D dissertation, “Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Moral Imperative Versus the Rule of Law,” addressed conflicting legal and ethical justifications for humanitarian military intervention.
Donahoe was previously a litigation associate at Fenwick & West in Silicon Valley, where she served technology clients in intellectual property and commercial disputes. Before that, she was a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School and law clerk to Senior U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick Jr. of the Northern District of California, since deceased.
Donahoe has worked with various human rights organizations including The Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights, where she researched the nexus between United States foreign policy and human rights, and Amnesty International’s Ginneta Sagan Fund, where she conducted strategy work related to human rights concerns of women and children.
A member of the State Bar of California since 1991, Donahoe attended Dartmouth College and Stanford Law School. She also holds master’s degrees in theology from Harvard University and in East Asian studies from Stanford, as well as a Ph.D in ethics from the University of California’s Graduate Theological Union.
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