Dear Senator:
I am writing on behalf of the AFL-CIO to urge you to support the nomination of Casey Pitts for United States District Court Judge, Northern District of California. Mr. Pitts is a talented, experienced and highly respected labor and employment attorney and we are confident he would be a fair and impartial judge.
Mr. Pitts graduated with honors from Yale College summa cum laude and was one of only 15 members of his class inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior. He then attended Yale Law School where he served as a Senior Editor of the Yale Law Journal and Managing Editor of the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. He was selected by Professor Reva Siegal to be the Coker Teaching Fellow for her constitutional law class and worked as a research assistant for her and for Professor Robert Post.
After graduating from law school in 2008, Pitts clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. As a partner at Altshuler Berzon LLP, one of the most respected union-side labor and employment law firms in the country, Mr. Pitts has represented workers, consumers, local and international labor organizations, public entities, and public interest organizations. This has allowed him to develop a wide range of areas of expertise including the First Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment, other aspects of constitutional law, administrative law, intellectual property, RICO, federal and state civil procedure, employment discrimination, voting and other areas of civil rights, federal and state wage and hour and labor laws.
Mr. Pitts has extensive litigation experience in state and federal courts across the country including work on pretrial discovery, pretrial motion practice, trial work and post-trial appellate work. He has been involved in important cases from beginning to end, including involvement in multiple appeals. His appellate work has included drafting briefs and arguing cases both in state and federal appellate courts. He lists more than 50 cases in his application in which he was counsel of record for one or more parties, all of which resulted in reported opinions. He has been named a “Rising Star” and “Super Lawyer” and was selected by the judges on the Ninth Circuit to serve as an appellate lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference.
In addition to the diversity of his work experience, Mr. Pitts would bring diversity as an openly LGBTQ+ judge, something currently lacking in the current make-up of judges in the Northern District of California. In law school he was a member of the Yale Law School Outlaws, an organization at the law school committed to providing community for LGBTQ+- identified people with the YLS and to advocate for legal issues of interest for that group, and since law school has continued to mentor young LGBTQ+ law students and lawyers.
We strongly believe that union- and employee-side labor and employment lawyers bring experiences and perspectives that will be extremely helpful in their service as federal judges. On the basis of his strong credentials, his extensive litigation experience, and his many talents, we highly recommend Casey Pitts and urge you to support his nomination.
Sincerely,
William Samuel
Director, Government Affairs