Lesbian moms. We’re judging you. At least some of us are, with Nicole Berner confirmed by the Senate Tuesday to a seat on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, joining Melissa DuBose, another lesbian mom who was confirmed last week to a U.S. District Court seat.
Berner is the first out LGBTQ person to have a seat on the 4th Circuit, the 11th out LGBTQ federal judge confirmed under President Joe Biden, and the 23rd out LGBTQ federal judge overall, among 814 active federal judgeships, per CNN. With her confirmation, Biden ties former President Barack Obama’s record of LGBTQ judicial appointments. Berner is also the 30th woman confirmed to a federal appeals court under President Biden, per NBC News.
Previously, Berner was general counsel to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), where she had been in-house counsel since 2006, says her nomination announcement. Prior to that, she was a staff attorney for Planned Parenthood Federation of America in Washington, D.C., a litigation associate at Jenner & Block LLP in Washington, D.C., and a visiting attorney at Yigal Arnon & Co. in Jerusalem, Israel, after clerkships on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She received a B.A., a J.D., and an M.P.P. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Additionally, Berner is a dual American-Israeli citizen who won a landmark parentage battle in 2000, getting Israel to recognize her as mother to her son after she had secured her parentage via co-parent adoption in California, as the New Israel Fund explained several years ago. She and her then-partner next fought to have Israel recognize her partner as parent to their two younger children, a process that ended successfully in 2009.
She is now married to attorney Debra Katz and is stepmother to Katz’s son. (Katz herself is notable for representing Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearings of now-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s, after Ford had accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault.)
Katz and all of their sons were at Berner’s confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last December, and Berner acknowledged them in her opening remarks, along with her new grandson and soon-to-be daughter-in-law who were not present. She also told the committee:
Being a mother has been without a doubt the most important, rewarding, meaningful, and challenging aspect of my life. I have always worked hard to model for my children the values that were instilled in my by my own parents and by my faith: values of hard work, commitment to education and community, to social service, and to the Jewish value of tikkun olam, repairing the world.
Maya Wiley, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement that Berner’s confirmation “adds crucial lived experience to the court and sends a powerful signal to young LGBTQ lawyers, law students, and other potential future judges that they belong on the federal bench. That matters.”
Congratulations to Berner on her appointment.
Bonus fun facts: The first lesbian mom to be seated on any appeals court in the U.S. was Alison Nathan, who was confirmed to the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022. The first queer woman, parent or not, to become a federal appellate judge was Beth Robinson, confirmed in 2021. All were nominated by President Biden.