Tuesday, December 8, 2015
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Feuer and Egerton Under Consideration for C.A.
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Los Angeles Superior Court Judges Gail Ruderman Feuer and Ann H. Egerton are under consideration for appointment to the Court of Appeal, the METNEWs has learned.
There are currently three vacancies in this district. Justice Patti S. Kitching retired from Div. Three on Oct. 5; Justice Fred Woods retired from Div. Seven March 31 retirement, and Justice Paul Coffee retired from Div. Six on Jan. 31, 2012.
Feuer, 56, has been a judge of the court since July 2005, when she was appointed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the time, she was senior attorney and director of the Southern California Air Quality Program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a post she had held since 1993.
She is a graduate of the State University of New York at Albany and of Harvard Law School. She clerked for then-U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima, now a senior judge of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, before joining the law firm of O’Donnell & Gordon as an associate.
She worked at the firm from 1985 to 1987, and was a deputy state attorney general, handling environmental cases, from 1987 to 1993.
Among her cases at the NRDC was Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles (2002) 103 Cal. App. 4th 268, in which she won what her client called “a stunning victory for environmentalists” when the court ruled that the building of a major shipping terminal at the Port of Los Angeles could not proceed without an environmental impact report covering all three phases of the planned construction.
The ruling wound up blocking the project for seven years, leading to a settlement that included significant pollution-reduction measures, and is credited with having spurred the joint Clean Air Action Plan adopted by the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The jurist is married to Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer.
Egerton, 61, was named to the court in 2001 by then-Gov. Gray Davis, after having served as senior vice president and general counsel, West Coast, for NBC, in which post she was responsible for all of the network’s legal matters on the West Coast.
Among the cases she oversaw was NBC Subsidiary, Inc. v. Superior Court (1999) 20 Cal.4th 1178, in which the California Supreme Court held that there is a presumptive right of public access to civil trials under California’s “open court.”
In previous positions, she handled a range of complex litigation matters, including commercial, antitrust, defamation, copyright, insurance and professional malpractice cases. She was also active in the American Bar Association and Los Angeles County Bar Association.
After graduating from Occidental College, Egerton received her law degree from UC Berkeley School of Law.
She is married to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John S. Wiley.
Both Feuer and Egerton have recently sat on the Court of Appeal by assignment.
The MetNews has previously reported that the names of Los Angeles attorneys Kent Richland and Bradley Phillips; Ventura Superior Court Judge Tari Cody; Los Angeles Superior Court Judges Rita Miller, Richard Rico, Helen Bendix, Ann Jones, and Sanjay Kumar; and Southwestern Law School professor Christopher Cameron have been sent to the Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation as possible appointees to the Court of Appeal.
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