Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing for several of President Biden’s first batch of judicial nominees, including two circuit nominees: Ketanji Brown Jackson for the D.C. Circuit and Candace Jackson-Akiwumi for the Seventh Circuit. I previously covered Ketanji Brown Jackson here.
Originally from Virginia, Jackson-Akiwumi graduated with honors from Princeton in 2000 and then went on to Yale Law School, from which she graduated in 2005. While at law school, she was a senior editor and served on the admissions committee of the Yale Law Journal besides being an NAACP LDF Earl Warren Scholar. After graduating, she clerked for Judge David Coar of the Northern District of Illinois and Judge Roger Gregory of the Fourth Circuit.
Jackson-Akiwumi worked as a litigation associate at Skadden, Arps in Chicago between 2007 and 2010 and then spent the next ten years as a staff attorney with the federal defender program for the Northern District of Illinois. There she represented more than 400 clients accused of federal crimes, tried multiple federal jury trials, and argued a half dozen appeals at the circuit level. She also served as an adjunct professor at Northwestern Law School. In December 2020, she became a partner at Zuckerman Spaeder LLP in Washington, D.C.