President Trump has nominated Daniel A. Bress to the Ninth Circuit seat vacated by Alex Kozinski. According to this article (subscriber-only), Senator Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, intends to oppose the Bress nomination on the ground that Bress supposedly has “so little connection” to California. And committee chairman Lindsey Graham has at least tentatively seconded Feinstein’s concerns.

A review of Bress’s actual ties to California (which I have drawn in large part from a close friend of Bress’s as well as from his Senate questionnaire response) indicates that Feinstein’s concern is ill-founded:

Bress was born and raised in Gilroy, California, the “Garlic Capital of the World,” and he retains strong family ties there. After his clerkships with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson and Justice Scalia, he began his career in private practice in San Francisco (where he had also worked during his two summers in law school), and he has been a member of the California bar throughout his career.

Bress has done more work in California courts than anywhere else, and he has continuously had California cases on his docket in private practice. He maintains an office in San Francisco as well as in D.C., and he spends a lot of time in California. Further, a major reason that Bress moved back to the D.C. area after his initial stint in California was to accommodate his wife’s career aspirations. (Is Feinstein really going to punish him for that?)

In addition to work on a number of Ninth Circuit cases, Bress has handled major consumer class actions in federal district court in California in the Northern, Eastern, and Central Districts. He has also had an active practice in the state-court system in California, with work on more than twenty cases. He handled an important appeal pro bono on behalf of parents seeking a charter school conversion under California’s Parent Empowerment Act. He also did significant work in state court in California on behalf of BASF in connection with allegations of asbestos exposure from a talc product; that work included arguing an appeal in the California Court of Appeal. He has argued extensively in California trial courts in Oakland, San Jose, and Los Angeles, and has also been involved in cases in San Francisco, Fresno, and Butte County.

In sum, Bress has robust ties to California.