Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

 

Page 3

 

USC Law Faculty Member Appointed Magistrate Judge

 

By a MetNews Staff Writer

 

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California yesterday announced the selection of Jean Rosenbluth as a magistrate judge.

Court officials said Rosenbluth will sit in Santa Ana beginning September 26, once she takes the oath of office, occupying a new magistrate judge position that was authorized by the Judicial Conference of the United States last September.

Magistrate judges are selected by the district judges, but are required to undergo background checks, including IRS investigation, before their appointments are finalized and announced publicly.

Rosenbluth currently serves as the director of the Legal Writing and Advocacy program and a clinical professor of law at USC, 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 USC faculty, 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.

She also clerked for Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez and U.S. District Court Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler of the Central District of California.

Rosenbluth graduated from Barnard College in 1983 before attending law school at USC, where she was editor-in-chief of the Southern California Law Review and graduated Order of the Coif.

Including the position slated 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.   

Full-time magistrate judges are appointed for eight-year terms and are eligible for reappointment.

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 19.4 million people—more than half the state’s population.

In 2010, more than 15,000 cases were filed in the district

 

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