Trump's First Black Female Judge Nominee

Trump’s First Black Female Judicial Nominee a Bipartisan Pick

• Stephanie Dawkins Davis was federal prosecutor, and she’s emphasized jury diversity
• Her bipartisan appointment comes amid rancor over judicial confirmations

Stephanie Dawkins Davis is Donald Trump’s first black female judicial nominee, and her bipartisan appointment comes amid the contentious drive by the president and his Senate allies to reshape the federal courts.
The magistrate judge and former federal prosecutor will appear this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee to answer questions about her nomination to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, which includes Detroit.
“She has a strong intellect, tireless work ethic and sound judgment,” said Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for that Michigan district who supervised Davis.
The GOP-led Senate has accelerated the pace of Trump nominations and Senate confirmations at the expense of bipartisan cooperation, Democrats complain.
More than 100 district and circuit court judges have been confirmed since Trump took office.
Partisan rancor over judicial selections escalated this spring when Republicans changed Senate rules to expedite votes for district court appointments over fierce Democratic objection. The GOP also is excluding circuit nominees from the so-called “blue slip” tradition of only moving forward on judicial nominees supported by both home-state senators.
Davis’s nomination is a bipartisan affair. The Trump Administration negotiated with both Michigan senators, Democrats Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow, before putting her name forward, the Detroit News reported.
She’s the first of two black female judicial nominees advanced by Trump, whose selections so far are mainly white and male. Ada Brown has been nominated to the Northern District of Texas.
Barack Obama appointed 26 black women to the bench in eight years, while Trump has seen one black nominee confirmed, Terry Moorer of the Southern District of Alabama.

Role Models

Social Security Lawyers Can Now Earn Higher Fees Because of Supreme Court Decision

Since 1956, the Social Security Administration(SSA) has made disability benefits available to people whose long-term medical conditions make completing their jobs impossible.

Lawyers who want to maximize their earning capacity don’t do Social Security law. They would be crazy to do Social Security law.

Recognizing that many Social Security disability claimants are in poor financial health, the federal government devised a payment scheme whereby lawyers receive a portion of their client's judgment if they win and nothing if they don't.

Since 1956, the Social Security Administration has made disability benefits available to people whose long-term medical conditions make completing their jobs impossible.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling earlier this year created a uniform method for allocating fees across judicial jurisdictions, ensuring attorneys will have access to higher fees regardless of where they practice.

Considering that just 22% of workers receive disability benefits on the first try, the attorneys who help these workers often don't see payment for years, if ever.

Without attorneys, disability benefit applicants can get lost in the confusing maze of the claim process. They must first take their case before an administrative law judge(ALJ), and if the judge rejects the claim or makes a mistake — which attorneys say is fairly common — they then must go to federal court to dispute the decision.

In some Federal Circuits, judges interpreted separate limits the Social Security Act placed on fees for legal work before the SSA and the federal court as a single limit, capping the overall fees at an amount equivalent to 25% of the client's benefit award.

As an example, Lawyers in the Third Circuit, were not affected by the fee cap that plagued disability attorneys in the Fourth, Fifth and Eleventh circuits before the recent Supreme Court decision.

In those circuits, judges interpreted separate limits the Social Security Act placed on fees for legal work before the SSA and the federal court as a single limit, capping the overall fees at an amount equivalent to 25% of the client's benefit award.

In other circuits, like the Third, judges allowed attorneys to collect an amount equivalent to 25% of the client's benefit award for court-level work. For agency-level work, attorneys could collect either $6,000 or an amount equivalent to 25% of the benefit award, whichever is less. Fees could come from both the benefit award and the federal government, which offers a pool of money to disability attorneys under the Equal Access to Justice Act.

The ruling's main impact could be to encourage Social Security attorneys who already practice in federal court to continue doing so, rather than abandon cases at the appeal stage because the money isn't good.

In the past, Social Security claimants' probability of successfully going up against the SSA varied depending on where they were. Now, claimants should have an easier time across the country.