Appearing before the U.S. Senate.

Getting on the governor’s shortlist.

Interviewing with the city council.

On Feb. 23, members from all levels of the judiciary appeared at an event sponsored by the Colorado Bar Association’s Judicial Liaison Section to speak about the various ways they ascended to the bench and the wide experiences in selection from court-to-court.

“Becoming a federal district judge is like being hit by lightning in a snowstorm,” said U.S. District Court Judge Nina Y. Wang, a 2022 appointee of President Joe Biden. “You can’t plan on it. You do the best you can to be prepared for the circumstances. And then you hope for the best.”

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In her case, Wang had been a magistrate judge for several years on Colorado’s federal trial court when she applied to a district judge vacancy. At the time, the Senate had never confirmed a magistrate judge to a life-tenured district judgeship in Colorado. Wang interviewed with Colorado’s two senators and her name ended up on the three-person shortlist for the White House counsel’s office.

“I did all of this during the pandemic, so I didn’t actually go to D.C. to interview. Which was a huge, huge bummer because I really wanted to go to the White House just to be in the White House,” she recalled.

After she was designated as the “presumptive nominee,” Wang said her selection was not announced publicly because she had to first undergo a rigorous background check. Then, after Biden formally nominated her, Wang played the “waiting game.”

“I didn’t know this, either: You wait for the Senate Judiciary Committee to invite you,” she said. “I thought it was just if you were nominated, you get a committee slot. That’s not actually how it happens.”

Biden nominated Wang in January 2022 and she said she expected to appear for a committee hearing in March. Days later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer announced his retirement, forcing the Judiciary Committee to prioritize confirming Breyer’s successor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Wang’s hearing was rescheduled for April, but two days before she flew to D.C., she got word she would not be appearing after all because of the Senate’s rules on how many nominees, and for which courts, can be present for a given hearing.

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About 24 hours prior to the first of her two votes before the full Senate, “the senators’ office calls you and tells you, ‘We think you’re gonna get out on the floor,'” Wang said.

She characterized herself as lucky to be confirmed roughly two months after her committee hearing. The newest district judge for Colorado, S. Kato Crews, waited in limbo for nearly a year before the Senate acted on his nomination this January.

“One of the best parts of our system, with no offense to my federal colleagues,” said Judge Ted C. Tow III of the Court of Appeals, “we constitutionally have to fill our (state) vacancies in 45 days. … We cannot have a system where somebody is waiting eight months after the process is theoretically done before somebody gets a yes.”

Tow has been an appellate judge since 2018 and was a trial judge in Adams County before that. He said he applied multiple times for each position. The final time he walked into an interview with the citizen-led nominating commission for the Court of Appeals, he quipped, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

“It is political with a small ‘p’ in the sense that there’s lobbying. When your name goes to the governor, you’ve got 15 days. And that is now your full-time job of getting every friend you have to call the governor’s office and put in a good word for you,” he said. “But it is not capital ‘P’ politics. There is none of that involved. And I very much appreciate that aspect.”

Also appearing on the panel was U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Prose, who succeeded Wang following her appointment. Prose was a longtime attorney with the federal government when she decided to apply for the bench. When she told her boss, he responded, “It’s about time.”

“I might be a late bloomer,” she said.

Prose noted there is one current and one announced magistrate judge vacancy on Colorado’s federal trial court. Otherwise, Colorado’s federal bench remains relatively young and new.

“If you look at our current slate of United States magistrate judges, it’s likely, I think, there won’t be a seat here in Denver for a good long while,” she cautioned.

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Jason Lantagne, the presiding judge of the Westminster Municipal Court, said he interviewed with the city council to get his position. Municipal courts can vary widely, with many judges working part-time and some handling cases only once or twice a month.

Laura Broniak, the chief administrative law judge for the Colorado Office of the Administrative Courts, said administrative law judges follow the hiring process for other state employees. As long as applicants have “solid demeanor,” they do not need to come in with specific knowledge of administrative law.

“There’s nothing magical to it. It’s not anything as onerous or difficult as what our federal colleagues are describing,” Broniak said.