President Joe Biden on Monday unveiled his first new judicial nominees in nearly a month, as he moved to appoint four new federal judges in three states.
The nominees include Darrel Papillion, a former president of the Louisiana State Bar Association and trial lawyer in Baton Rouge, nominated to serve as a federal judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana.
That state has two Republican senators, Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy, who under Senate customs must return so-called “blue slips” indicating their support for any district court nominee from their state for the nomination to advance.
Biden’s other federal judicial nominees are Jeremy Daniel, a federal prosecutor in Chicago nominated to be a judge in the Northern District of Illinois, and Brendan Abell Hurson and Matthew Maddox, two federal magistrate judges in Maryland up for life-tenured positions as district court judges.
With their nominations, Biden will have announced 161 judicial nominees. The Senate has confirmed 117 of them, most of whom have been women and people of color, in keeping with Biden’s pledge to diversify the federal bench.
The progressive Alliance for Justice says Biden has also won the confirmation of a record 31 judicial nominees with backgrounds as public defenders, whose ranks in the judiciary are small compared to former prosecutors and law firm partners.
Hurson, if confirmed, would add to that record, after spending much of his career as a federal public defender before being named a magistrate judge in 2022.
