Biden nominates Sacramento Superior Court’s Daniel Calabretta to federal judgeship
Daniel Calabretta was nominated Friday to become a U.S. District Court judge for the Eastern District of California.
Calabretta, now on the Sacramento Superior Court, is among eight nominees announced by President Joe Biden for federal judgeships around the country. Each must be approved by the U.S. Senate.
Calabretta will need 51 Senate votes to be confirmed. Fifty senators caucus with the Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris would break any tie. Most Biden nominees have been confirmed.
The White House noted Calabretta is openly gay and hailed his historic appointment, saying he and other nominees “reflect the diversity that is one of our greatest assets as a country — both in terms of personal and professional backgrounds.”
Calabretta has been a Superior Court judge since 2019.
Prior to that, he was deputy legal affairs secretary for Gov. Jerry Brown and deputy attorney general in the California Department of Justice from 2008 to 2013. Harris was attorney general part of that time; she took office in 2011.
From 2005 to 2008, Calabretta was an associate at Munger, Tolles and Olson LLP, a Los Angeles law firm. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens from 2004 to 2005 and for Judge William Fletcher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit from 2003 to 2004.
Calabretta received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 2003 and his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in 2000.
He’s rarely been in the news. In 2015, he was quoted in The Bee after Brown released 113 pages of personal emails related to the governor’s work.
The Bee had made a California Public Records Act request, coming after Brown was asked about the furor over then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of personal email.
Brown’s emails, The Sacramento Bee reported, were “a collection evincing a governor who works late, appreciates brevity and holds a keen interest in media coverage of his administration.
Calabretta, then deputy legal affairs secretary, explained Brown “occasionally uses a personal email account for informal communication with staff.”
California has four federal court districts, with the Eastern District being the largest geographic area. It goes from the Oregon border south to the Tehachapis, and from the Coastal Range in the west to the Nevada Border in the east.
Its main divisional offices are in Sacramento and Fresno with outlying magistrate judges in Yosemite, Redding and Bakersfield.
The Eastern District judges include U.S. Magistrate Judge Allison Claire, the first member of the federal judiciary in the nation to be in a state-sanctioned same-sex marriage.
This story was originally published July 29, 2022 at 7:59 AM.
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