he story goes that last fall Sen. Barbara Boxer used two words to break the logjam on Los Angeles U.S. District Judge Richard Paez's nomination to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott wanted a friend, the mayor of Tupelo, Miss., named to the Tennessee Valley Authority. Boxer blocked the mayor, whom she had never heard of, causing a Lott aide to ask what possible interest the Californian could have in the TVA.
Boxer is said to have replied: "Richard Paez."
Boxer's chief of staff, Sam Chapman, confirms the context: Boxer did go on record in October saying Lott shouldn't expect his nominations to sail through while people she supported, specifically Paez and a woman judge who had waited two years for a vote, sat in limbo; the following month, Lott agreed to call the two judges for a vote on March 15.
Notwithstanding a mini-mutiny filibuster by conservative senators who labeled Paez a radical, Lott stood by his word and the judge won confirmation.
The object of this top-level hardball, meanwhile, is almost invisible as he sits on the bench presiding over his last big trial. When one side or the other makes an objection, Paez often waits a couple of beats to see if the attorneys can resolve it on their own. The trial is a $300-million-plus suit by Isuzu against Consumers Union for disparaging its Trooper sport utility vehicle as a roll-over risk. Seven weeks into trial, the proceedings are so dry and repetitive that an attorney in the plaintiff's camp whispers wisecracks about the sweetness of stolen sleep.
There's a dispute the attorneys can't resolve among themselves. The defense wants to substitute a clearer photocopy for Exhibit 2174, which has been copied so often that a line indicating the width of a test track looks to be two feet off and so does not reflect the original given government regulators. The plaintiffs object that representations of test track width is a central issue.
The judge is matter-of-fact. Although the Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles boasts posh and impressive courtrooms, Paez appears to be holding forth at his kitchen table as he looks from one photocopy to the other. "I'm sure there's some great subtlety here, and I'm just missing it," he says good-naturedly. In the end, he crafts a compromise: The smudged copy will stay in, as Exhibit 2174a, while Exhibit 2174b will be the clearer copy.
A defense lawyer says "Richard Paez is one of the most decent, just-plain-nice people I have ever met. He's so nice, he won't shut attorneys off when they should be. This should have been a four-week trial."
The lawyer, like most observers, assumes the objections to elevating Paez to the Ninth Circuit were biographical. Namely, the judge spent the 1970s practicing poverty law, first as a staff attorney for California Rural Legal Assistance and then the Western Center on Law and Poverty, and later as the executive director of litigation for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. It was Gov. Jerry Brown who named him to the municipal bench, where he stayed through a succession of California Republican administrations. When he made the unusual leap from municipal court to U.S. district court, it was through the intervention of President Clinton.
But critics had other objections. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, termed Paez an "extremist," based in part on a 1997 ruling that set forth what the senator termed the "outrageous" proposition that an American company can be liable for human rights abuses committed by the company's partners in Burma. Legal scholars are mixed on whether the case, Doe v. Unocal, 963 F.Supp. 800, invented new law or was a good deal less daring than its closest precedent, a Ninth Circuit case.
On the criminal side, there were fewer objections to Paez, perhaps because so many law enforcement figures called for his elevation.
"It's ironic," says Chapman. "Paez is not a political person. We would talk about what strings could be pulled, and I came to believe that his life is doing his job and spending time with his family."
The judge is married and has a son and a daughter. In less controversial times, when he gave interviews, he called himself a "liberal" who is a product of his Mormon upbringing.
