Just days after U.S. Attorney Jessie Liu in Washington withdrew from consideration for a pinnacle Justice Department position, an association of women attorneys decried the objections to her nomination as “out of place” and stated they were improperly used to derail her ascension to the third-in-command position as partner lawyer. Liu, the pinnacle federal prosecutor in Washington and a former Big Law white-collar associate, ran into opposition on the Senate Judiciary Committee over her past association with the National Association of Women Lawyers, a group that opposed Justice Samuel Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2006. Liu’s past association with the institution especially irked Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a former Alito clerk, who questioned her conservative bona fides, consisting of her stance on abortion.
In an assertion on Monday, the NAWL extensively criticized the competition for Liu’s nomination over her ties to the institution, where she had been vice president in 2005 when the competition for Alito turned publicized. The affiliation states that the grievance of Liu could have a chilling effect on attorneys interested in becoming members of bar associations and different professional corporations. “Objections had been raised to U.S. Attorney Liu’s past involvement with NAWL—a one hundred twentynon-profitfite agency that has fought to ensure equal opportunity and advancement of women attorneys in the felony profession and gender equality under the law,” the employer stated in its statement. “These objections had been misplaced and had been improperly used to derail U.S. Attorney Liu’s nomination.”
