Ninth Circuit Judges Kozinski and Wardlaw, California Supreme Court Justice Kruger to Judge Neumiller Competition

UC Davis School of Law students participating in the 2015 Irving L. Neumiller Competition will test their oral advocacy skills before an impressive panel of nationally renowned judges: Judge Alex Kozinski of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,  Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw, also of the Ninth Circuit, and Justice Leondra Kruger of the Supreme Court of California.

The Neumiller Competition is the culmination of each year's Appellate Advocacy program at King Hall, wherein top students from the Appellate Advocacy course are selected to compete in front of a panel of distinguished judges.  In recent years, the panels have included Chief Justice of California Tani Cantil-Sakauye '84, Seventh Circuit Judge Frank Easterbrook, Eighth Circuit Judge Steven Colloton, Ninth Circuit Judges Michael Daly Hawkins, Sandra S. Ikuta, Stephen Reinhardt, and Mary Schroeder, among others.

Judge Kozinski, who was born in Bucharest, Romania and brought by his Holocaust survivor parents to the United States in 1962, graduated from UCLA School of Law in 1975 and went on to clerk for then-Ninth Circuit Judge Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice of the United States Warren Burger. He was appointed to the Ninth Circuit by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, and was the Ninth Circuit's Chief Judge from 2007-2014.

Judge Wardlaw, also a graduate of UCLA School of Law, was a law clerk for Judge William Gray of the Central District of California from 1979 to 1980, a private practice attorney from 1980 to 1995, and served as a member of the Justice Department Presidential Transition Team for the Clinton Administration from 1992 to 1993. She joined the Ninth Circuit in 1998 after being nominated by President Bill Clinton.

Justice Kruger is the newest and youngest appointee to the Supreme Court of California. She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens of the U.S. Supreme Court and served in the Justice Department from 2007 to 2013 as an assistant to the U.S. solicitor general and acting principal deputy solicitor general, arguing cases on behalf of the federal government before the U.S. Supreme Court. 

The 2015 Neumiller Competition will be held on in the School of Law's Kalmanovitz Appellate Courtroom on Saturday, April 11 at 4:30 P.M.