Executive Session

Floor Speech

EXECUTIVE SESSION -- (Senate - January 25, 2010)

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Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I rise this evening in support of Professor Rosanna Malour Peterson. She is a distinguished law professor and attorney.
She is a woman who enjoys broad bipartisan support, and she deserves a seat on the Federal bench.

I was very pleased to introduce Professor Peterson before the Judiciary Committee last November and meet her and her family. I thought it was telling of the type of nominee she is that so many of her current and former students were there to support her confirmation. Tonight I am honored to recommend that the Senate confirm Professor Peterson as a district court judge for the Eastern District of my home State.

Professor Peterson has strong bipartisan support with good reason. She has devoted her career to serving the interests of justice and to instilling those values in a future generation of leaders.

Professor Peterson is a graduate of the University of North Dakota, where she earned her bachelor's, master's and law degrees. After law school, she started her legal career in the chambers of Judge Fred Van Sickle in Spokane. This is the very same seat she has now been nominated to fill.

During her distinguished career, Professor Peterson has worked as an attorney in Spokane area law firms, for corporate and individual clients. She has worked in private practice, often representing teachers, and she has worked as a court-appointed representative for criminal defendants in State and Federal court. Since 1999, Professor Peterson has been a law professor at the Gonzaga Law School in Spokane, where she is assistant professor of law and director of the law school's externship program. At the same time, Professor Peterson has maintained her private practice, where she has continued to work with Federal defendants on a pro bono or reduced-fee basis.

Professor Peterson has also played a leadership role in the Washington legal community, including serving as president of the Federal Bar Association of the Eastern District of Washington, president of the Washington Women Lawyers Bar Association, and on the judicial selection committee that helped recommend a magistrate judge in 2003. In recognition of her service in 2006, she was awarded the Smithmoore P. Myers Professionalism Award, the Spokane County Bar Association's highest honor.

Professor Peterson's accomplishments stand for themselves, but I have also received numerous letters and e-mails testifying to her toughness, her work ethic, her understanding of the law, and her advocacy on behalf of her clients. I have also received many letters from her former students and the people she has mentored, taught, and befriended over the years, letters that all say she has made a difference in the lives of so many in my State.

She clearly meets the standards of fairness, of evenhandedness, and adherence to the law that we expect of our Federal judges.

Outside of her many professional credentials, I have been impressed by her professionalism and decency. I know I speak on behalf of a large number in the Washington State legal community in supporting the nomination of Rosanna Peterson to be the next district judge for the Eastern District of Washington.

I do think it is also important to note, for all my colleagues, that Professor Peterson's nomination was the product of a bipartisan selection committee that we use in my State of Washington to get to where we are with this confirmation vote. The commission was formed and did much of its work on Professor Peterson under the previous administration. It has proven that it works, even as we have moved from one administration to the next. I am proud to have created that selection commission and believe it is something that has served our State and our Federal judiciary well.

Therefore, it is my pleasure to recommend my colleagues confirm a great lawyer, a teacher, and a mentor who I believe will make an exceptional Federal judge. I urge my colleagues, this evening, to vote for the confirmation of Professor Rosanna Peterson as the next district judge for the Eastern District of Washington.

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