David F. Levi
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David F. Levi (1951) is a U.S. jurist and current Dean of the Duke University School of Law. Until June 1, 2007, he was Chief Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California.[1] At the time Levi left the bench, he was widely considered to be one of the top federal district court judges in the nation. [2] His departure removed him from consideration for nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.[3]
Some scholars believe that Levi could win widespread support in the Senate as a Supreme Court nominee.[4] Those scholars also mention him as a possible candidate for the job of Attorney General.[5]
Levi was born in Chicago, Illinois. His father was Edward H. Levi, a former president of the University of Chicago and United States Attorney General under President Gerald R. Ford. He received an undergraduate degree from Harvard College, in History and Literature (magna cum laude) in 1972 and then entered the graduate program in history at Harvard where he eventually specialized in English legal history. He received his law degree in 1980 from the Stanford Law School, where he graduated Order of the Coif and was President of the Stanford Law Review.
From 1980 to 1981 he served as clerk for Judge Ben C. Duniway of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and from 1981 to 1982 as clerk for Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell. In 1983, he joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California as a prosecutor. In 1986 he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of California. Levi directed a major corruption investigation involving several California legislators and was also a member of the Attorney General's Advisory Committee and Chair of the Public Corruption Committee of United States Attorneys. In 1990 he was appointed by President George H. W. Bush as a judge to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. He became Chief Judge of the Eastern District of California in May 2003.
In 1994 Levi was appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist to the Advisory Committee on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He was appointed Chair of the Civil Rules Committee in 2000 [6]. In October 2003 he was appointed Chair of the Standing Committee on the Rules of Practice and Procedure, which sits at the top of the federal judiciary's rulemaking process.
Levi was one of the founders and the first President of the David F. Levi and Milton L. Schwartz American Inn of Court at the King Hall School of Law of the University of California at Davis, and has served as Chair of the Ninth Circuit’s Task Force on Race, Religious and Ethnic Fairness and as the President of the Ninth Circuit District Judges Association.
In 2005, Levi was elected to the Council of the American Law Institute (ALI). A member of the ALI since 1991, Judge Levi was an Adviser to its Federal Judicial Code Revision Project and an Adviser to the Institute’s new Principles of the Law of Aggregate Litigation. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.
He is coauthor of Federal Trial Objections (James 2002).
Levi's wife, Nancy Ranney, is a leader of the country’s grass-fed beef movement, and operates a cattle-ranch in New Mexico[7] He has two children; his son William is a student at Yale Law School.[8][9]
